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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.'"
HTML5 may offer a unified way to do things...but that does not mean that the other ways will just vanish. It will be a long time before HTML5 completely displaces Flash or Java applets, assuming that such a thing even happens. Frankly, I doubt that the popular browsers will even have a reliable implementation of the standard until at least 2013, so HTML5 won't really offer developers anything unified for a while.
Palm trees and 8
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You most certainly can block it -- it resides nicely between two tags. The bigger question is, will asshole web developers use canvases in places where straight up text would have worked just fine, and force us to deal with their CPU eating abominations for no good reason at all?
Palm trees and 8
This is why I read the comments before the article.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
I think I'll just put the canvas tags right besides the body tags and save myself a lot of work instead of dealing with this whole Aech Tee emm Ell thing.
HTML5 is just another level of bullshit to worry about when writing a web page that needs to render properly on multiple browsers.
The core assumption that users cared about filling correct metadata was wrong outside the research community (and even outside the IT research community). It will take off but you need software to fill in what was assumed users would do.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
HTML5 will improve security
While I love many things about HTML5, the idea of throwing out rendering libraries and starting again from scratch does not necessarily fill one with confidence about the security of the tools. Sure, less reliance on plug-ins means less opportunities for 3rd party security holes. But doing everything in the browser code itself also means that the potential attack vectors have more direct control over the machine. Plus any new library is going to have security vulnerabilities for a while.
I'm not saying HTML5 is insecure. But let's not kid ourselves: there will be a year or two of scrambling to fix new attack vectors.
The ______ Agenda
***HTML5 will allow applications to tap local file storage***
Once or twice a decade I encounter a "They can't possibly be serious" moment. This is one of those occasions.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Closing tags, for example, should come naturally. Do you leave parentheses out when you're writing in a scripting language? Emacs at least at NXML-mode which shows you immediately if you've made a mistake that will not let the document validate.
And anyone who has had to extract data from a webpage ought to adore valid, semantically-meaningful XHTML, because it makes the process effortless whereas HTML requires specialized, not always accurate libs and a lot of work.
That's a wise choice I'm not sure others will follow. If possible, it's always best to use the oldest specs that are still supported that will actually do what you want the page to do.
As to chickens and eggs, the egg came first, as any palientologist or biologist will tell you. Chickens aren't the only animals that lay eggs. It's ok if your egg lays dinasaurs, as long as the dinasaur is well trained.
Free Martian Whores!
The issue isn't that it's not possible, the issue is that HTML5 seems to tend towards HTML markup over XML markup.
Effectively it pushes bad practice as standard because there really is no benefit to HTML markup other than the ability to write sloppy markup, which is stupid.
People publish using tools nowadays, leave markup to the professionals (not that writing well formed XML is hardly a difficult job). If people can't understand how to write well formed XML markup then they've got no chance of understanding CSS and Javascript so might as well give up and use a web app to publish for them anyway.
Best to support the people who actually write web apps to make it easier to write better web apps, than to support sloppy developers who use HTML markup "because it's easier".
No, it will make the situation better. It takes the real web into account, and standardizes behaviors that are already in use out there. At the same time, the spec is much clearer and easier to implement correctly because it also specifies error handling and such. In other words, the opposite of your FUD.
No, the spec has been written to be clear to implementors how they should implement it properly.
Ok, so Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera have no real experience from large scale software development? Heh.
Clever signature text goes here.
You're joking, but I actually foresee this being used very widely to block copy/paste and web scraping.
There may be nothing stopping me from using well-formed XML in my HTML5, but I won't be scraping my own website. I'll be scraping other people's, who very possibly aren't using well-formed XML. It's not just a question of what it lets me, as a fairly knowledgeable and responsible developer, do.