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Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts
bonch writes "On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML 5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. They've given some feedback on the current editor's draft, saying that they 'have more questions than answers' and criticizing many of HTML 5's new tags, like <header>, <footer> and <aside>, calling them 'arbitrary' or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."
The usual journalistic nightmare of a summary.
They did not call header and footer arbitrary or unnecessary. They questioned the implementation as to validity for printing.
They did call aside arbitrary as well as section.
From reading the post, I see a lot of good insights into what might be an overly-cluttered and, in places, badly written standard. While there is always an element of Microsoft playing their own games, this does raise valid questions.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Depends on who you want to believe.
A recent Digg poll showed that many people are incapable of escaping using Internet Explorer i.e. on closed systems or at work, so it's no surprise IE still has as lingering percentage of marketshare.
Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are [...] "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently"
Wow, I wonder where they got that from?
They already call XHTML 1.0 strict sites broken under IE 8. They cite "errors on the page" with yellow "!".
Still account for at least more than 60% of users, no matter what source of statistics you use. I know for a fact, as a web developer, that if anything is wrong in a page when rendered on IE, our clients would notice instantly and file that as a bug in my code, not IE's code.
You can install it, but it's often against company IT policy...
HTML is a markup language. It tells the browser "this is a paragraph" or "this is important".
Telling the browser that the top section of a website (Slashdot's tab bar) or the bottom (the search bar, quote, copyright, and links at the bottom) is exactly the sort of thing the browser should know. Screen readers would, in particular, benefit from this; most people don't need to hear the header or footer on every page.
Unnecessary? Sure - websites do fine without it. But telling the browser more about the page is a Good Thing.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
It is worth noticing that MS seems to be the last to support a given standard, even once it's recognized as a standard -- they'd rather come out with their own competing "standard".
Case in point: OOXML. ODF works well, and could conceivably be extended to match the capabilities of MS Office. Instead, Microsoft launched a competing, far worse standard -- one nearly impossible for a competitor to implement completely -- and rammed it through Ecma and ISO so that it would be called a "standard", even if it currently has zero compliant implementations (MS Office manages to screw up its own "standard").
Now, I'm not "happy as a pig in shit" when others do similar things. I'm no fan of Apple, for example -- in particular, the iPhone's restrictions disgust me. On the other hand, I do hold Microsoft to a higher standard, as they still have over 80% of the browser marketshare -- meaning if Mozilla implements a standard, and Microsoft doessn't, that standard is pretty much useless to me unless I'm willing to tell 80% of my users to go home.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
<video> wasn't removed, having to support a specific codec was removed. So Microsoft would be well within their rights to pick the codec(s) they want to support. Just as the rest will (Mozilla will pick Theora, Apple will pick H.264, Google picks both).
The video/audio tags have NOT been removed, their just wasn't a consensus on what codecs should be used, thus their is nothing specified about the codecs in the specs. You know what, that's exactly the same as for example the image-tag.
New things are always on the horizon
I was gonna mod you up, then saw that you're running one of those stupid "hotter than" sites.
You can run a program from any place you have NTFS execute permissions.
In short, multiuser OS security was never designed to protect users from themselves.
You should just ask what the browser can do rather than the browser name. That is the number 1 issue.
Apple has put some great information regarding capabilities detection, it can be applied to any browser not just Safari/Webkit.
http://developer.apple.com/Internet/webcontent/objectdetection.html
(no account etc. needed)
You should sniff for the Gecko version rather then Firefox. I run Seamonkey (Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3pre) Gecko/20090802 SeaMonkey/2.0b2pre) which uses the same browser code as Firefox.
I hate it when a site doesn't display or use features because I'm not running Firefox or tells me to update to Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism