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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.
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.
While everyone should keep an eye on Microsoft (*was always) this is generally a good thing for the Internet as a whole. We as consumers, and we as web-developers, alike will be a lot happier if all the major players can create a consistent experience.
If Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are all on board before the spec' is even in the final stages we have a fairly good shot of similar behavour no matter the platform or browser.
A lot of Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are either - "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently" or "Do we need this?" Both of which are fair questions to ask and something that others will want to answer before HTML 5 goes live.
MSHTML 5 is coming.....
"We didnt like the standard so we improved on it"
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!
As Microsoft will be one of the foremost implementers of HTML5 (with IE still having a majority of the market share, unfortunately) it's a very good thing that Microsoft has decided to become involved in the spec rather than leaving it up to its competitors, giving it some notion of responsibility in how the spec turns out.
It seems some of the comments are looking for simple justification (such as why the >aside< tag exists, use cases, etc.) as well as more clear definitions of other new features (including their very own original contentEditable feature), and rather than "influence the spec" as the summary claims, it looks like the IE team is looking critically at how a completely new entity would approach HTML5 (not having had the vested involvement other browser makers have).
What remains to be seen, however, is if the IE team responds to the working group's justification and follows through on the spec, or if it only trusts its own judgment and implements the parts it deems "necessary". This is still the dogged-slow Microsoft team, and in spite of great improvements in IE7 and IE8, reporting issues in the spec during the Last Call stage is not an encouraging insight to their commitment to making HTML5 happen.
They could have raised these complaints a long time ago. There is a process for this and they chose to ignore it.
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.
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.
The amount of code that can be removed from a web app if you give the condition (!msie) is incredible. This is why more libraries do a check at initialization to determine if they're dealing with IE or "anything else", and then dynamically load the code for that environment.
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I don't want people who doesn't have power/basic knowledge to install a compliant browser to be my customers anyway.
Nice job if you can get it...
The rest of us are stuck with the "graceful degradation" (what a wonderful oxymoron that is) that's required if the browser is determined to be IE. The major problem is that when you want to *move forward* -- start using powerful CSS, canvas, and actually have a JavaScript engine that can run JS, as opposed to "crawl" it. In these cases you don't have much of a choice -- you either give up on functionality that's core to the app that you're designing, or give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
People that happilly spend their money on a crappy OS with a crappy browser are EXACTLY the kind of customers you want to buy your obviously crappy, "it worked fine in the laboratory"-style products.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm not sure that is the right thought process to be applying, given that HTML 5 is supposed to extend HTML 4.01 ... regardless
of the specific feature in question.
One hopes that's just a really rushed/broken edit artifact,
not a real reflection of what they think.
I could believe many of their comments are appropriate, but it's worrisome to see one like that escaping orbit.
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.
Indeed. As a former debugger developer I used to highlight this particular issue -- we even had a trade show cut-out figure named Bugsy Malone who was wanted for assaulting a global with a deadly pointer. (Hey, it gave the geeks a smile and the suits didn't know what it meant.)
However, as a developer I would say that bad pointers were at most 1% or 2% of our problems, if that. Non-thread-safe threaded code and leaked memory were much bigger issues at the time (1980's).
I read the mailing list post by Microsoft. The overall impression is Microsoft mainly pouring cold water on the HTML 5 spec.
Why are they posting these objections just now? These tags appeared in the first official draft on the W3's web site a year and a half ago.
Let's review what we know about Microsoft:
1. If they could sell us paper plates for $1,000 each, they would.
2. If their browser held 99% market share, they would completely ignore this spec.
I can see how a programmer who has read a lot about "semantic purity" might think the new tags are superfluous. But is Microsoft a company known for its pursuit of elegance and academic purity? Its post is just plain rude. This late in the game, and so full of negativity (disguised as "questions"), it's the sign of a company grumpily giving in.
Now, about the alleged superfluity of the tags, you might as well call all tags but one, a generic <div> tag, superfluous. Just use one tag, and add classes to it (<div class="paragraph">, <div class="heading">.
<aside> has the same effect as <div class="aside"> but with the benefit to the programmer of less typing, and the benefit of the web of more uniformity (instead of <div class="aside">, <div class="marginalia">, and <div class="tangent"> in different web sites).
For a while I drank the "semantic" Kool-Aid. It has a point, but like most dogmas, taken to an extreme, it approaches absurdity. After a while, I returned to the table.
With properly designed CSS and Javascript, you can always have a fallback that basically equates to "how you would've done it in HTML 4", that'll work just fine in IE.
In my new sites, IE users get a functional app, but not a pretty, or even necessarily ajaxy one.
It's extra work, but you end up supporting all sorts of crippled browsers, from lynx, to cell phones, to IE.
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
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