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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.'"
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
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the semantic section tags, which only cover a tiny subset of the sections a site tends to have and which appears outdated before it's even launched (i.e. no comments section tags).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.
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.
Why are we using HTML5 and not XHTML 2?
XML abuses aside, XHTML is superior to HTML5.
HTML5 requires a more complex parser than XHTML ever will. XHTML can be validated for correctness, HTML5 is more difficult to do so.
I honestly don't understand the reason for following the HTML route. XHTML is already in an industry understood format that tools already exist for.
The market rarely reflects a superior technology. I still support XHTML. HTML5 is messy, ugly and a kludge.
All that needs to happen is to transfer some of the newer tags of HTML5 into XHTML. Perhaps we can borrow from the microformat peeps? Afterall, it's supposed to be modular.
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