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Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts

Posted by Soulskill on from the fashionably-late dept.

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."

5 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. For this one, RTFA by bruce_the_loon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:For this one, RTFA by colfer · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Mozilla developer who posted a response on the list agreed strongly also.

  2. Re:Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? by vivaoporto · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Point of HTML by slimjim8094 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  4. Re:but you know how hard, complex Opera support is by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)