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W3C Says Don't Use HTML5 Yet
GMGruman writes "InfoWorld's Paul Krill reports that the W3C, the standards body behind the Web standards, is urging Web developers not to use the draft HTML5 standards on their websites. This flies in the face of HTML5 support and encouragement, especially for mobile devices, by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. The W3C says developers should avoid the draft HTML5 spec (the final version is not due for several years) because of interoperability issues across browsers."
My thoughts exactly. This reminds me of 'Pre-N' wireless, which took far too long to ratify a standard that was already in wide use. They sat on their asses so long, it became a joke in the industry. If the governing body takes this long to certify it and they are claiming 'years' more in the future before the standard is finalized, then something is broken. This smacks of Google's 'beta' status. Eventually you have to shit and get off the pot.
Essentially they just need to finalize it, and for those bits that aren't production ready, defer them to HTML6.
I had to read that part a couple times to make sure it was right. Several years? What are these guys smoking? They actually expect people to wait that long?
What we need is "a day in the life of a W3C draft" article to figure out why these standards and recommendations take so long to mature.
* chirp * chirp *
I tried to create a website that had to present some 480p videos. I encoded them to Ogg Theora, and figured I could forgo Internet explorer compatibility by encouraging visitors to use either Firefox or Chrome. Unfortunately, for all the noise Firefox makes about supporting open standard, their insistence on implementing their own video support rather than relying on Underlying os ability is completely messed up. Every platform I tested on exposed different bugs in Firefox that prevented the site from working. On Windows, some of the videos would freeze on first frame. On Ubuntu Karmic version of firefox, (3.5) the videos played well, but was unable to control position, (no forward or backwards seeking, even when buffering was full.). On Ubuntu Lucid, the videos would stutter and even while paused, made Firefox slow to respond to window scrolling. In the end, if I wanted to use HTML5 video, the only browser currently working well is Google Chrome. If I instead decided to use the de-facto x264 standard, I increase my browser compatibility across the board (except for Firefox.)... So yes, while I know video is only a small part of the changes, using the new specs is far premature.
I agree with iONiUM.
There is no clear advantage or improvement that HTML5 would provide in delivering information or selling goods to our customers on the web. I don't feel like dropping everything I am doing, to re-write or re-implement everything I have now, and the customer is perfectly fine accepting. NO Client ever cared what language the site is presented in, as long as it looks decent. Html 5 is grand I am sure, but I still present websites in php driven html 3. I have enough on my plate with the workload I have now.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
It is also a fantastic way to actually see what works. Essentially, we are seeing a big beta test of the HTML5 spec. No one is going to go out and build a HTML5 dependent web site, but lots of folks are building in enhancements for browsers with support. It helps ensure what makes it into the spec is what people are actually building sites with and what user's are actually using, rather than simply what the workgroup thinks people would like (or what is in their interests, for whatever reasons).
In a work placement year I did the major electronics company had a couple of staff on the board for a standard -- it involved lots of XML and internet stuff, so it's not far from the kind of thing W3C does.
What took so long was working out whether technology that required infringing on each company's software patents should be "required" or "optional". In the end, Sony, Philips, Panasonic etc decided to pool their patents (their stuff is "required"), the patent troll companies were excluded by the big company's votes (so the neat technology they'd patented was "optional" or left out entirely) and the couple of small businesses or individuals who'd already got products running using the draft spec were ignored.
HTML5 will be great, but it is not there yet. I wanted to implement HTML5 for all the videos on my website, but unfortunately, I was unable to find any good HTML5 video player with all the bells and whistles that the Flash players can offer. On top of that, the HTML5 videos players I tested with Flash fallback, were showing the video preview picture without anything suggesting that it is a video, not a picture - for example play button on the center. For the time being I am away from HTML5, even if I like it. I hope they will release decent HTML5 video players soon, that I can easily replace with the Flash, but have the fallback modes for the people with old browsers or mobile devices.
Correction -- Firefox 4 is going to be Firefox's first release that begins to support the HTML5 form enhancements. Opera has already supported those form enhancements since version 9.5.
I quite deliberately said that Firefox 4 will be the first good implementation of HTML5 form enhancements. I wrote HTML5 form support for MediaWiki, but disabled it – partly because of an inexcusably bad WebKit bug, but also because Opera's support is just cruddy. The UI is terrible – red-bordered boxes that only appear when you try to submit the form, not when you actually do the invalid input.
And I quickly found one killer bug: if a password element doesn't meet its constraints, it outputs the currently-entered password to the screen in plaintext, so <input type=password pattern=....> to require passwords of at least four characters is a non-starter. I reported the bug to Opera around the time 10.00 was beta, and it's still not fixed in 10.60. To replicate, cut and paste this into your URL bar:
data:text/html,<form><input name=foo type=password pattern=...><input type=submit></form>
Then type one or two letters in the password field (not more) and try to submit. So, Opera's great and all, but its implementation of this stinks.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
First off, Canvas is fucking redundant and never should have been created in the first place. SVG has existed since 2001
Canvas and SVG are very different. Canvas uses an imperative model, SVG uses a declarative model. Your comment is like saying we don't need OpenGL because we have VRML. Some things are much easier to implement with canvas, some are much easier to implement with SVG.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
._. The original plan of WhatWG was to stabilize in 2022 . Yes. 12 years from now. But the devil is in the details and I am not 100% up to date on the W3C details. I get the feeling that the W3C is trying to be the Debian of standardization organizations though. Slow and stable.