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."

Comments

Re:More evidence of the W3C's increasing irrelevan

[DJRumpy]

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.

Re:More evidence of the W3C's increasing irrelevan

[M. Baranczak]

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?

Re:More evidence of the W3C's increasing irrelevan

[kccricket]

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.

Re:Flies in the Face of Common Sense Too

[tixxit]

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).

Re:W3C is the problem

[Simetrical]

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.