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How HTML5 Will Change the Web
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond the codec and plug-in wars to examine nine areas where HTML5 will have a significant impact on Web development. From enabling more interactive graphics, to tapping local file storage, to geolocation, HTML5 is rife with rich capabilities — and may even improve our ability to secure applications delivered via the Web, Wayner writes. But the most important impact of HTML5 will be its ability to simplify Web development itself: 'HTML5 offers one language (JavaScript), one data model (XML and DOM), and one set of layout rules (CSS) to bind text, audio, video, and graphics. The challenge of making something beautiful is still immense, but it's simpler to work with a unified standard.'"
Nope, HTML5 really makes the whole situation worse too, because rather than being a forward thinking spec, it takes everything that's been done wrong over the years, and makes it part of the standard. Then it adds in a load more stuff that appears half thought through (the video tag that doesn't do what it was originally intended for- standardised video), the semantic section tags, which only cover a tiny subset of the sections a site tends to have and which appears outdated before it's even launched (i.e. no comments section tags).
The ideology behind HTML5 is rather than create a new spec that tells people how things should be done, make a spec that takes everything bad people have done and make it standard, so that those incompetent developers are now adhering to the standard.
Overally it means more ambiguity, more jumble in the spec, stuff that might (has?) become obsolete before it's barely even used and that sort of thing.
HTML5 will change the web alright, back to the philosophy of hack it together any which way, who cares about lack of maintainbility, interoperability, accessibility and so forth. This seems an extremely backward way of doing things when web apps are getting ever more complex, and average Joes who publish are publishing via web apps anyway mitigating the need for them to get their hands dirty with markup.
HTML5 just doesn't come across as a professionally written spec, you compare it to other specs out there and it looks like it's been slapped together by a bunch of kids with no real experience of large scale software development.
There is nothing stopping you from using well-formed XML in your HTML5, or serving your document as application/xhtml+xml (explicitly stated in the HTML5 spec). Serving HTML5 as proper XML is dubbed "XHTML 5". It uses the same doctype. All the new tags -- video, audio, section, header, etc. are supported, but obviously the lax markup features of HTML5 (like being able to omit most tags) no longer apply.
HTML5 includes an XML model which is optional—much like the previous HTML 4/XHTML 1.x system. I expect many developers to use the XHTML syntax in their HTML5 projects for all of your reasons. Meanwhile, the proposal for XHTML 2.0 was unsuccessful because it was created almost completely without regard for what browsers and coders were already doing—it's incompatible with previous formats, where HTML5 was designed in part to gracefully extend the old formats and incorporate emergent practices already in use on the web.