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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."
"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."
Whatever Microsoft decides to implement is going to become a defacto standard.
It's the sad but true result of still significant share of the browser market.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It doesn't matter how long MS waited. They will just "extend" the standard and call all other implementations broken.
Seriously, does anyone other than a first time Windows user actaully use IE for serious/prolonged web sessions?
Between Firefox, Opera and Safari, is IE still being used to any great extent?
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Actually, the "lol wut" was the first post. You didn't quite make it.
That said, I've read the mailing list comments from the MS guy, and none of it seemed like unreasonable moaning. I agree that it's an excellent thing that MS is getting involved - IE's market share may be declining, but it's still the dominant browser, and I think MS is still capable of doing tremendous amounts of damage to emerging web standards if they refuse to support them.
MS definitely did a poor job of tracking the standards effort. Getting changes they want is unlikely. There is definitely the appearance and likelihood of MS just trying to impede the standard because every other major browser producer is way ahead of them on HTML5, and the features contained therein are a huge threat to IE. If Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all support HTML5 and can give better video and interactive without Flash (and notably Silverlight), then Web devs may find it worth it to leave IE out of their support efforts to get out of having to use proprietary technologies with more cumbersome licensing circumstances.
That said, generally they have some points. Many of these tags to me seem analogous to ,, and similar tags from HTML that are widely regarded as a poor idea to use in the age of style sheets. The philosophy widely espoused with regard to modern web development is to separate content from presentation (much like much GUI application design philosophies). Many of the tags MS mentions seem to go against that design philosophy.
Some other criticisms are not along those lines (i.e. they don't question the validity of some tags, just if they are 'as valid' as other tags that could have been added with it. These criticisms seem a little more hollow at times without much substance.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Funny that supporting Opera is nothing more than supporting W3C standards and give up 1990s lame tricks like browser sniffing. Same goes for Apple Safari (Webkit), Firefox.
It is not extra work, it is what they (webmasters) should be doing at first place.
The latest numbers I saw show MSIE of all versions combined at 66% where Firefox is over 25%. While Microsoft is still "the majority" by large amounts, this is not an election where only one winner is selected. Microsoft's position at the top isn't as significant at the size of the minority remainder which is about 34%. Long ago, when Microsoft commanded over 95%, nearly everything else was negligible. When it fell to 90%, developers started to take notice and to design for that 10% as well as for MSIE while some still remained MSIE only. But now the minority is too large to ignore. If you were running a business, would you feel comfortable alienating 5% of your customers? Maybe... but 10%? What about 33%? Ah, so you can see why MSIE's lead isn't as important a the size of the minority.
Actually, most people would like to see a browser without the need for plugins, so no Flash, no Silverlight/Mono. Just the browser doing all in a way that the page around it can actually interact with it properly. So you can rotate video's and take snapshots and apply filters for the blind. Or have proper hinting about what it is (an object-tag placed by a javscript on the page isn't very clear to a screen reader in comparison to a video-tag) and control by the blind, because the browser has control of the video.
New things are always on the horizon
Adrian Bateman did himself and his team a disservice by putting so many unrelated comments into a single post. Yes they are all related to HTML 5 but then again the mailing list itself is about HTML 5 so the context is set and individual posts should be scoped more narrowly. The end result is that the list lacks priority and appears that each of the comments/feedback sections have the same priority when they really do not.
They bring up some interesting thoughts about a few of the tags/implementations but these are lost in the general negativity of the post.
Additionally some of their comments seem to be focused on unrelated topics such as how the header and footer elements should be handled when printing... ??? as if they are expecting the header and footer to be placed at the top of each printed page in a multi-page print out of a web page. While interesting as a topic of discussion this should not be lumped in with other comments as it is obviously a very low priority for a specification dealing with digital media primarily.
Add to this that they had previously stated that the header and footer elements appear to be unnecessary and I as a reader am left wondering which statement is more important - either they are unnecessary or they are useful but not as useful unless they implement something to do with printing the document... pick a stance Adrian. You can't state conflicting opinions like this and hope to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion for Adrian Bateman is to break up your feedback into more narrowly scoped questions so that they can be responded to in the priority they deserve. I can only think that your intent was to force others to do this work for you and thereby discover what others felt were the priority items to discuss or to set off a generally chaotic discussion of issues and thereby create dissension within the group, bringing up old concerns that have been discussed at length long ago and resolved or agreed to already.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This *is* the process for this. The HTML 5 spec is not even remotely close to being done. "Too late" does not apply.
The summary seems reasonable to me, if a little brief. Addressing your specific comments:
They did not call header and footer arbitrary or unnecessary. They questioned the implementation as to validity for printing.
About these tags (among others), they said: "It's not clear why these new elements in particular are necessary." This implies that they see them as unnecessary, and question why the particular set was chosen (i.e. that they consider the set arbitrary). "Arbitrary and unnecessary" is a perfectly reasonable summary of the sentiment of this sentence.
The printing issue is probably secondary; they are no better or worse for printing than the div/span tags that MS appear to prefer.
Basically the point MS seem to be making is that they see little value in standardizing the semantic markup of these (and other) elements. They appear to be approaching it from a rather limited perspective of browser implementation (whether traditional or of the screen-reader type), without considering that there may be other ways of processing the documents in question where the new tags make a lot more sense.
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.
I don't see that. WHATWG had good reasons for including the tags they chose as semantic markup that extend beyond browser implementation concerns, and MS seem to be ignoring those reasons (which are well documented in the mailing list archives). There are one or two comments that make some sense (the date/time input field concern, that the format of date specifications passed as attributes to the tag does not allow specification of a timezone, is somewhat serious, and a lot of what they're saying about the application installation feature makes sense), but overall the impression I get is that they've failed to see the bigger picture.
Someone now does a websearch for the keyword term "traction engine" using Bing, and they find that your blog seems to have >300 posts mentioning that very subject. Then they get quite pissed off with you, because they keep visiting pages on your site and finding that the blog entries referenced don't have anything at all to say about their favourite subject. What's happened is that when you posted the article, the title got copied into the auto-maintained "recent posts" list widget on your blog's sidebar, and the Google and Bing search engines don't know how to distinguish between the linked text in your blog widgets and the contents of the main article. And not only does Google now think that you have 300 separate pages on traction engines, but since you included that cute little widget that lists the current top ten stories on CNN, Google and Bing also thinks that you have 300 blog postings about Michael Jackson, and also about a bunch of unsavoury keyword stuff that's currently in the news.
So if someone's seriously asking, do we really need HTML5 to support a way of allowing authors and blogging engines to voluntarily tag sections as belonging to an article or just to a nav bar, then the answer is "hell yes", we certainly do if we want search engines to continue to work properly.
The "MS team" studying the HTML5 draft spec is supposed to already =know= stuff like this. They're representing a company that actually owns a major search engine, for crying out loud.
Eric Baird