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HTML5 Splits Into Two Standards
mikejuk writes "Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. W3C is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a 'snapshot' of their living standard. Of course now being free of W3C's slower methods WHATWG can accelerate the pace of introducing new technologies to HTML5. Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself 'Which HTML5?'"
There's so many to choose from.
So when browsers claim to be fully HTML5 compliant, will that even have any meaning anymore?
We start seeing "best viewed in chrome" animated gifs?
"Living standard"? Perpetually unfinished with no accountability for stability, is more like it. Didn't Google patent that?
What a monumentally bad idea ...
The one supported by by Webkit and Gecko?
and I wanted to moderate this story down for its appalling failure to call W3C "W3C" two times out of three.
"Living standard" is kind of an oxymoron. The whole point of having a standard is so that authors have something to target, and developers know what is necessary to be standards compliant. A constantly evolving standard creates a moving target, which I believe is actually counter-productive.
We were only 10 years from something beutiful...
captcha is "savaging"
The whole world should slow down. Stick with a stable standard for a while. And relax.
WHAT The Fork?
Standards compliance with multiple standards is a headache, but diversity is generally a good thing so long as it's balanced with reliability and thorough testing.
I don't know how this will evolve over the next few years, but my gut says it'll end up being positive with a few downsides.
At risk of sounding trite (for which I apologize), I'll just say competition is a seed for innovation.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I read somewhere that there are something like 500 tests for compliance, and that the current "good" browsers are hitting 300-450 of them.
Stick a fork in this process. It's done. Classic example of the difference between architects and programmers. The programmer's code compiles. The architect's doesn't (and yet they get paid more, respected more, etc.).
Solution: fire all the architects, release a reference implementation under a permissive OSS license (BSD, MIT, etc.) and make that the standard.
... was likely wrong. I saw "WHATWG" and what "who the heck is that?" - I figured the W3C version would really be the only one anybody would care about.
Turns out I was just ignorant regarding WHATWG.
Now I know that WHATWG is, in part, driven by Apple, and its head is now working for Google. That means WebKit will probably follow the WHATWG version, which in turn means the web interface on the vast majority of mobile devices will follow that standard. And that's not even considering Mozilla, who's also part of the WHATWG group.
Really the only major player not involved is Microsoft - but they've been a follower rather than a leader for the past several years, at least when it comes to web standards.
#DeleteChrome
W3C slowed down because Microsoft refused to play along for so long and they are part of the committee. With the about face of IE 9/10 that problem should go away as all browsers rapidly race towards incorporating CSS 3 and HTML 5 features first including simply proposals that are not even draft yet!
I favor cutting off HTML 5 proposals now to finalize it faster. THen put the newer features in webkit and Gecko in HMTL 6. If people are getting giddy about HTML 6 accelerated SVG and ajax stuff it will put pressure to retire IE 8. It will be perceived as very obsolete much quicker and non compliant otherwise the corps wont leave which will mean CSS 2.1 and HTML 4 until 2019.
That thing is a thorn in our side and it will become the new IE 6 of this decade because it comes with Windows 7.
Also doing this will prevent Chrome from becoming the next non standard browser as well.
http://saveie6.com/
And make sure the evolving standard is backwards compatible with all past iterations (new tags and attributes merely ignored, rather than changing the behavior of existing tags and attributes) then the evolving standard is the way to go.
Improvements have to perfect layers of onion skin. Every new version in no way modifying impacting or touching the previous behavior. If attribute x drew a red square in ver 1.3, it cannot draw a blue square in ver 1.4. If a blue square is new functionality, you need a new attribute xx. Attribite x never changes.
It could get messy and very inelegant to remain backwards compatible.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One should be called Pentiuml and the other Pentiuml 2.
I was considering whether or not to implement my new cross-platform application in a web-standard markup language. Now I will abandon all of the retarded HTML for good.
This news actually makes this choice very easy for me as a developer. I now see the browser landscape as inhospitable for cross-platform development.
A snapshot of a broken, inconsistent "standard" is not an improvement. Scrap it all and start over with a sane person in charge.
I will stick with XHTML 1.0, because XHTML2 was sacrificed to appease the loonies, until a reasonable successor is devised.
Call the standard HTML 5.
Make sure it's fixed and doesn't change.
Then you can make HTML 5 extensions or whatever you want to call them,
and browser vendors can implement them as they wish.
You could even bundle these extensions into groups that don't change any more, for instance:
HTML 5 extension set a
Later these can be incorporated into HTML 6 if needed.
If you make HTML 5 a "living standard" it becomes useless.
Saying this browser implements HTML 5 would mean nothing, because next week the standard could be different.
I hope they at least try to work together to ensure they don't make the two standards completely conflicting.
HTML5 is, by any sane definition not a standard. A constantly changing standard is even less sane. The "try to keep up" mantra the WHATWG is pure evil.
Why? No browser will ever be able to "support" WHATWGs HTML5. So each browser will only support a subset of the current dialect of 6 months ago, at best. One of the symptoms is the current browser-specific CSS3 mess. Developing a website with this mess means not only writing each CSS3 property several times in all webkit- moz- foobar- and plain variants but also cross-testing everything with every browser every release, since almost always something changes there.
No fixed standard means that there is never any consistent rendering of anything for longer than a few months. Except for the "old HTML5" subset that everybody has already consistently implemented and tested for a year or so. Which is what the W3C ought to use for the standard, so we should applaud them for it. Fixed, tested, proven standards are a good thing. Only remaining question is, what will the standard be named and how does one annotate the version which a document should be compliant to, given the current HTML5 "there is no doctype" crazyness?
What better way for Google to control the web than to keep pushing the standard foward so it turns out Chrome has the best support for everything first.
Microsoft failed to try and conquer the web by creating their own standard and my fear is google just figured out how to do it out in the open by always changing it.
A standard is a standard. It is not a moving target. That is its whole point.
Other things that are mandatory for a standard:
- simple (or as simple as possible)
- clear
- easy to implement
I think this just killed HTML5, because now it will become a complex monster that basically is never ever compatible with anything. Funny how history repeats itelf because people are too stupid to learn its lessons.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And with HTML 5 it is bad enough already. The standard is so amazingly complex that none of the browsers seem to have the same idea of how to support it. Things that will work in one don't in another, or they work less well and so on.
My favourite example is the HTML 5 Angry Birds game. In Chrome, it's "recommended browser" (something that shouldn't ever be necessary) it runs fast, and full featured, but Chrome seems to 'asplode on it randomly. Firefox is stable with it, but no sound/music, just visuals. IE is stable and has sound, but runs a bit slower than the others, it can't maintain 60 fps. This is even given that they've done work to make it work on all platforms.
So how about let's fuck off with new HTML standards until we have non-fucked up 5 implementations in at least most of the browsers. Then maybe we can worry about something new.
There are huge areas for improvement in web apps. There is no good way to do 3D. A web app should have direct access to an OpenGL. HTML5 can play audio (usually poorly) but there is no API for recording it. There should be a way to interface with cameras, etc. But all of this belongs in HTML6.
There goes thin client user interfaces and thank god for that, quite frankly. And in related news, the cost of writing thin clients just went up 70%.....
This was mentioned over a year ago that this was happening? (January 2011 ! )
http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
"Today we have phones like my Andriod as well as IPhones that give a much better browsing experience than my desktop?!"
Are you having a laugh? The browsing "experience" on a smartphone doesn't come anywhere close the what I have on my dual 22 inch desktop monitors. If you seriously think that can be replicated on some rinky dink 3 inch screen then you must have problems with your eyesight..
"On my computer it flickers unless I use IE 9"
Then your computer is a piece of junk. Go and buy one built in the 21st century.
"Why should the best experiences be only for phone based applets?"
Errm , you do realise that applets are programs, not web pages?
Your post is nothing but Google smearing speculation.
MS and Apple are guilty of trying to strong arm computer standards. MS was even caught bribing OSI officials to sanction MS's bogus OOXML standard.
What has Google done?
So, if I get this right, there will be two standards: the working one and the non-working one.
Guess which one the web-developers will follow?
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
The standard is already a decade ahead of the implementation of the standard, what is the point of developing it faster?
And the idea of having a constantly changing standard is ridiculous, make a static standard so that eventually everyone can have a working version based in the same standard. That is the point of a standard after all.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"HTML5" is a marketing buzzword, just like "Web 2.0". HTML 5 is a loose coupling of emergent technologies which is in a constant state of flux as new shiny stuff is added by the competing browsers (Internet Explorer is not one of these). 'Twas ever thus that new things appeared hoping to be part of the standard - either by saturation or by conscious decision - before the standard is declared. This is nothing new.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Here we go again.
This should have been the method from the beginning.
I'm sick of you people moaning that a "moving standard" is backwards.
You should be detecting working features before you even use the damn things in the first place. It is standard practice to prevent any damn errors from happening.
Anyone against this is showing their true colors as a developer. (and I don't even do it all the time myself! So, yes, I am a hypocrite at times!)
Every browser is different. It is the fault of the W3C and their terrible system of MUSTs and MAYs or whatever the hell they use now.
They weren't strict enough and now that has left us with every single browser working differently with CSS rules for JavaScript, it has given us HORRIBLE input management, it has given us quite inconsistent DOMs across every browser at the lowest levels, and many others.
Don't even mention library or your monitor will become a fist.
Libraries to cover up W3Cs mistakes should never have been tolerated! EVER!
So don't even dare sit there and say "we need solid standards!", I don't think there is a single browser out there that is 100% complete and actually accurate with every standard. Not even Opera.
WHATWG are giving people who actually give a damn about web development what we want.
W3C are old farts sitting on their rocking chair listening to a radio and shouting out the window at the kids.
They are the ones who use the scroll bar to scroll things instead of using a scrollwheel.
They are the ones who take about half a century to read the damn start menu.
Everybody already doesn't care about the limited crap setup by W3C. Well, those of any worth.
W3C ruined the web tech front. Absolutely ruined it.
They can keep their limited crap. No other industry in computing does this. It is either feature versions or a free-for-all. HTML, JS and even CSS are improperly labeled in one group all the time.
Speaking of that, where are the CSS versions? Why is nobody complaining at that? Eh? Where are your words now?
CSS already is this. It is literally a cascading standard, to use its own name. Its use, the use of attributes, they grow and die as the web evolves.
This works well, there are no problems with this. (except IE as always)
So why the complaints now? You can't select your CSS version. I don't think any browser even supports selecting JS versions anymore since nobody cares about it.
Why does a bloody markup language have to be any different? Why do features that have pretty much no relation to each other have to be slapped in with each other under some global header as "HTML5"?
IE and everybody else.
This is de facto true for anyone who has tried developing websites for a living.
This is also true in the standards bodies where MS is keeping the brakes on W3C so that resources don't have to put into keeping IE current.
No need to get butt hurt. You're right about MS. They had the most to lose by Office losing its dominance by having a free standard controlled by someone else. Google isn't the only company in WHATWG but they're certainly the biggest one who has the most to gain by pushing everything into onto the web and of course they have the most to lose if that doesn't happen or takes too long.
It doesn't matter to them if we head back to a dark age where developing a site that supports all browsers is a PITA.
Or stuff like this, as noted by one of their WHATWG partners. https://twitpic.com/a9cji2
A standard is something that is defined. If you are constantly changing it and updating it, it isnt a standard.
The standard is living and the users die... I here a soviet Russia joke coming on...
In Soviet Russia, here's you.
I wan't the well-behaved structure of XHTML! :-(
How can one misspell W3C twice in so few words?
God, root, what is difference ?
HTML is a W3C standard. You can't have two competing parties developing new versions of a standard and both calling their work by the same name.
While what the W3C based the HTML5 standard on was WHATG's work. The W3C "owns" this standard, and any extensions WHATWG makes, for now, will just be unofficial extensions. A working group does not make a standards body.
You can't have a "living standard" per se.
You can standardize an options/extension mechanism, and make a provision for vendor-specific addons, or additional options, but that's about it.
Ultimately you do have to have a snapshot, and set some things in stone, so that developers can implement the standard, they're not going to rewrite their browser every few months for you, and a "standards" body ignoring details like agreement among the vendors is not likely to succeed!
Also, it takes a long time for developers to implement new changes to standards, get the bugs out, AND meet compliancy levels. Look how long it took to get anything close to an Acid3 compliant browser. Finally Internet Explorer 10 will supposedly pass all the basic tests (and still doesn't guarantee compliance with the standard).
Javascript seems to be everywhere, and so I doubt it will disappear after HTML5 comes out real soon now. Are draft standards for the shitty Javascript language as strict as HTML5 was first envisioned to be?
Imagine where we would be today if only people had put their time into automatic application upgrade and deployment systems instead of trying to force everything into a browser by recreating everything that had already existed just one level down. The software world would be so much nicer. You'd click a link that downloads and installs the correct version of the application for your OS+hardware. You'd then go through a list of security check-boxes approving which parts of the system the new program requests to use and you're off and running. (This in no way prevents most of the data from being served from and/or stored on the server)
But no. HTML is the fully cross-platform language that works everywhere, is supported by everything, and looks the same across all platforms. Except if..., except when..., except on.., except..., except..., except..., etc...
Now we're getting browser plug-ins being listed as programs on the task bar. Programmers like to torture themselves. Somehow the most fucked up and hacky solutions are rated better than the nice elegant ones. If it wasn't hard to do or the solution isn't difficult to understand, it must not have been worth doing.
I don't know a lot about how these types of standards work, so I could be wrong, but they can't *both* be HTML 5 if they aren't the same, right?
Shouldn't one be HTML 5 and the other would be a superset of that... maybe HTML 5.x ?
Unless WHATWG plans on removing features so their browsers can't properly render stuff that's compliant with WC3's standard. It sounds sort of like being in a developer's beta stream for an app. You can stay with the "stable" version, or get nightly builds with new features that may or may not eventually end up in the stable channel.
And this will sink them into irrelevancy; they're not much more than an obstacle these days. I'm sure there'll be some warts (cf. "blink") but overall it's to see things get done without the icann of the web standards world.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Sory to post this here, but it seems that SLASHCODE'S CSS HAS CHANGED IN A WAY THAT IT NO LONGER OBEYS CHROMIUM'S MAGNIFICATION COMMAND.
I am sight impaired and CANNOT READ unles with high magnification.
Please fix this!
In soviet Russia, the standard chooses you!
When all else fails, try.
This (except correctly referring to the W3C instead of "WC3", whatever that might be) was announced on the WHATWG blog on January 19, 2011. How is this news?
Actually, no -- prior to the change at WHATWG in 2011, there were two HTML5 efforts (WHATWG and W3C). Now there is only one (W3C). WHATWG's living standard is for HTML, with no number attached to it. The two standards have somewhat different purposes. The WHATWG living standard represent the common functionality that browser vendors have agreed to implement, the W3C standard is more conservative. In theory, given the goals of the two standards, the W3C one would be the better one for app developers to target and the WHATWG one would be mostly a tool for browser vendors to align on what features they were going to work toward getting to the point where they were generally usable, and be much more forward looking. But that requires the W3C to draw a line in the sand and commit to finishing HTML5 (and then get started on HTML6, etc.) Otherwise, you end up with the WHATWG work that is officially a living standard, and the W3C work is a series of "Working Drafts" chasing the WHATWG living standard but never actually producing a stable standard, either.
Ian Hickson is the editor of both docs (he's actually the editor of the main HTML standard, the WHATWG one; the draft hosted by the W3C is really nothing more that an old and incomplete copy that nobody among browser vendors takes seriously).
He explained very clearly the past and current situation: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Jul/0119.html
And, yes, the WHATWG has done an excellent job so far, bringing much needed features to the web and creating an era of faster and more interoperable browsers. If they had just waited for the W3C we would still be stuck with HTML 4.01, IE6, Flash and other plugins.
Also this is not a new development, HTML (from WHATWG) has started gradually leaving the HTML5 (from W3C) behind a long time ago. Where the two differ, all major browsers (including IE) either already follow HTML or plan to. See this post from more than a year ago: http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
When people talk about HTML5 features in browsers and websites, they actually refer to the HTML standard. The HTML5 "working draft" on the W3C website doesn't even support the old 2D canvas API, which is implemented by all browsers!
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
WHATWG split off from the W3C work because they couldn't organize additions and clarifications to the HTML 4 spec under the W3C. It is mostly a group of browser-makers (everyone except Microsoft).
The W3C then asked if they could standardize the WHATWG's work as HTML5
What happened a year ago (and is just being put on slashdot today?) was that the WHATWG announced that they weren't going to stop producing additional work. The version under the W3C would eventually be released as version 5.0, but WHATWG would effectively be the HEAD/master version of work on extending HTML.
Which HTML5 is an easy question to answer - there will only be one HTML5. People will put pressure on the browser manufacturers to support the W3C's standardization of HTML as version 5.0. But browser manufacturers will also continue to cram new crap and functionality in ahead of W3C standardization, and attempt to define interoperability of that under the flag "HTML" in WHATWG, a "specification" that grows as the members gain consensus on how new functionality should work (or in some cases, how to advertise the functionality is not offered).
In reality, this is how HTML has _always_ operated.
I don't understand why people think this is such a bad idea. This is the similar to any source tree having a "development branch" and a "stable branch". WHATWG will be responsible for evolving the fast-paced devlopment branch of HTML while W3C will take occasional snapshots and stabilize the features of the development branch into "full standards". I assume that most of the complaints here are related to either bad marketing - WHATWG should just start calling their version HTML6 or "future HTML" or something - or the fact that these bodies (especially the W3C) move slowly and we are in the middle of a new stable branch getting pulled.
By the way, HTML5 isn't, according to the W3C a standard yet. The current HTML standard is 4.0.1. HTML5 is planned to be a "full standard" in 2014. In that time, WHATWG will introduce dozens of new major features into what will probably be called either HTML6 or HTML5.1 when the W3C gets around to pulling another snapshot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Version_history_of_the_standard
In soviet Russia, the standard chooses you!
In soviet Russia, the standard forks you!
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
either they just came up with a process to explain why they can't finalize html 5 or they just decided to split the people who are dragging their feet out of the equation.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
"Living standard"? They're more like guidelines.
Agree. "Living standards" reflect the reality of the software industry much more accurately, as long as they stay backwardly compatible with previous generations of the standard the I don't see the problem. If you need to break backward compatibility* then you need to fork the standard. Snapshot standards are ok for technologies that have more or less stopped evolving.
* - Backward compatibility is what users need, forward compatibiliy is what users want, and they will get it when the first software dev gets his hands on a time machine.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...that this split officially happened in January 2011. It's also a shame that HTML5 has been a "living standard" for two years, seven months and eleven days. At least you try, /., at least you try.
XKCD
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Whoever, is forking the process should trademark a new name and call their standard by that name. To keep calling it "HTML5" is just mean.
Perhaps "HTML5X"
Part of the reason we've had a good level of interop on the web in the last ten years is because HTML4 didn't evolve. We need to do the same with HTML5, have a document that can remain unchanged for ten years at least, so that the web as a whole can sync up to the same document.
Code all your websites in Flash! You get a stable, cross-platform rich browsing experience without all the issues of figuring out what version of HTML you need. With some work, we can turn the browser into a stable, speedy Flash-delivering platform and let HTML die like the dinosaur that it is.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
So, what the point here? Is it to make development as difficult as possible and presentation unpredictable? WHATWG's living standard is going to ensure that developers waste all sorts of time trying to figure out what feature is supported on what browser. Is feature x supported on Webkit? Gecko? IE? Oh wait, what about the various implementations of feature x?
Honestly I just want to know what's going to allow me to deliver a reliable, effective product with the highest profit. I should never ever see "Sorry, this website requires BAR browser." A living standard will require more software patches and less backwards compatibility. If someone tells me that their user-agent is fully FOO 3.4 compliant I expect it to behave like every other FOO 3.4 labelled software out there.
Not really. If the clients accept his work on the basis he describes and it allows him to pay is bills on time AND go on vacation with his family for a couple of weeks in the summer, he is absolutely right.
HTML has always been what browser vendors and the developer community said it was, not something in a W3C standard. So W3C just became irrelevant for the future of HTML5. Or, as previous posters point out, they haven't been relevant in the first place, so now they just officially announced the Status Quo. In any case, nothing to worry about.
It's how the human mind & language work... Just sayin'.
A few years back, it looked like XHTML was the future. The basic idea of XHTML is "the syntax has to be right". XHTML parsers are not required to parse anything that isn't valid XML. HTML5 parsers have explicitly defined semantics for common errors in HTML, like malformed comments. With XHTML, there was no question what the tree representation of the document was.
But people wanted the freedom to copy and paste broken ad code into HTML documents, so we ended up with HTML5. Personally, I'd like to have strict XHTML and require that everything be UTF-8. It's time to retire that "upper code page" crap.
Can I please have a button that limits my browser to html 4.01? HTML 5 has thrown in everything including the kitchen sink. I don't want that functionality available to the web hack at http://random.web.site/. It's too much. I only want it on a web site I've decided I trust and I'd rather have it in a completely different program.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
1. Microsoft codes the next version of IE for the W3C HTML5 Standard.
2. Microsoft adds some "enhancements" to IE that diverge from the standard.
3. Microsoft publishes said browser.
4. Being IE, every website makes itself compatible with the browser.
5. We now have three standards.
The trouble is, trying to shoehorn every application under the sun into a web app format is a bad idea. The web is not designed to be an operating system or an application delivery platform. It's designed to efficiently and portably distribute content.
The longer we persist with this fad of trying to make it do more than that, the longer it will be before we switch back to building real applications with tools that are fit for purpose. JavaScript and the typical server-side scripting languages are OK (not great in most cases, but OK) for their common jobs, but they are somewhere in the dark ages when it comes to general programming power. The kind of software execution models for things security and concurrency that we have in browsers and therefore web apps today are similarly prehistoric by modern standards.
And so I respectfully disagree that building serious web apps is just now becoming possible. The state of the art in web-based applications is decades behind the state of the art in native coding, with absolutely zero exceptions to my knowledge.
The only "serious" web apps that have enjoyed wide success are those that are essentially front ends for a database with perhaps some limited interactivity. Obviously that covers a fairly wide class of software development projects. Moreover, it has certainly shown that there is a lot of value in providing simple but effective tools to manage everyday tasks, often at the expense of incumbent 800lb gorilla do-everything applications. Still, writing simple database front-ends is very far from being the whole software development industry.
Even in that field, these database UI web apps don't really do anything that a native app, a basic data transfer protocol and a sensible software install/update protocol couldn't do at least as well and often much better. (What do you think a huge proportion of mobile apps really are?) If only we could stop trying to replace that final software install/update protocol with web-hosted apps or proprietary distributions/repositories/app stores and just make the damned thing part of every major operating system the way it always should have been.
IMHO, what actually needs to happen if we're going to make real progress with this part of the software development industry is to establish a systematic, robust architecture that learns from the many successes of web apps but is built to support general applications from the start, running on a serious OS platform either natively or in a powerful and flexible VM, supporting a variety of languages and programming styles, dealing with distributed resources and security as first-class concepts, and so on. We already know how to solve most of the relevant problems, but we aren't using that knowledge. Apparently it's cleaner to write every trivial database UI using at least five different programming or mark-up languages, or something, and it will probably stay that way as long as we try to make every programming job into a web app.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
-1? How undeserved. It's a great, ironic retort.
Lol. "this site has features Your browser may not support. Please try Google Chrome." Was that the point you were trying to make, or just a funny coincidence?
Can you back up the claim about IE?
It's how the human mind & language work... Just sayin'.
And that's a golden standard right there. /sarcasm
A fixed standard is predictable and easy to develop for. A constantly changing "standard" isn't a standard, it's just a reader's digest of the current "state of the art".
No, I don't. The answer to that question is Gopher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
There should be a single implementation, not a single standard. Testing different brands is a pain in the ass and wasteful. There will always be subtleties in interpretation. Why not just have a single render engine and share the fucker?
Sure, there are still versioning problems even with a single engine, but they are smaller than MultiVendors x Versioning would be.
Table-ized A.I.
They should do the same thing as the doctype and drop the number altogether.
Like anyone would understand HTML as "the old html from before the beginning of time, when netscape was a browser and people used newsgroups as forums and irc and whatever".
Let legacy apps use HTML 4, xhtml et al and just move forward.
The WHATWG standard is the HTML Living Standard.
The W3C standards effort is HTML5.
See the blog post (from January 2011, so this is decidedly not news) announcing the whole process shift at WHATWG.
nt
The web browser interoperability in the last few years (after IE6) is a product of the WHATWG standard, that started in 2004 (it wasn't called HTML back then). Just an example: HTML 4.01 doesn't specify a way to parse HTML that actually works and doesn't specify at all how to handle errors. The result is that every browser had a slightly different and incompatible parsing algorithm. Let me make this clear: no browser ever implemented HTML 4.01. Not a single one of them. Because HTML 4.01 was extremely buggy and unmaintained. It caused the IE6 era. The HTML5 draft on W3C is less buggy but still severely incomplete, stopping making major changes just means that all browsers vendors are completely ignoring the HTML5 from W3C and going instead for the HTML standard that's actively maintained and updated.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
HTML 5-Vorbis and HTML 5-MP4
Oh lovely, a complete square one.
Screw HTML5. It's, what 12 years too late? Web enabled Applications are the future!
You disagree? Really? Think about what you even need HTML5 for... Yep, Making apps. Exactly my point. Ah, but not really, because you need a shitty scripting language that's not very standardised to make everything work. Fuck THAT unsigned code mess and ridiculous document display language...
Applications do it faster, better, with less development time (In my experience), and with more consistent rendering.
Let's see: I push out a Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS app with a single cross platform toolchain, OR, I try to support ALL of those [b]plus[/b] SEVERALl different browsers, each with SEVERAL different versions.... Yeah, it's death by over 9000 papercuts.
Protip: The web really isn't designed to do what you want, and there's a perfectly good OS API sitting RIGHT THERE.
Great, now I really know which technology to use for desktop applications!
Solution:
XHTML1 + balls
Because there is a separate W3C spec for 2D canvas:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext/
I'm starting to feel like the whole "standards will never evolve predictably" argument is a troll argument...
"The great thing about standards_There's so many to choose from."
haha, but in any context where standards change, there will be an **ongoing** conversation about what the standards should be. Evolving standards will **certainly** precipitate competing ideas. (see also xkcd comic linked below)
And people will discuss and debate those ideas. That is **normal**...actually its **necessary**
In this particular standards debate, HTML, there are clear goals and values. The conversation should be about which option meets those the best, other non-traditional options...then a **decision** and a moving forward.
That's how the "standards are important but foster endless arguments point" becomes a troll...
We know its possible to argue infinitely about standards...the idea is to **not** do that, thank you very much ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
UTF-8 still lacks a lot of things that most of us in the US and most of Europe don't really wrestle with, but there is a reason there is also a UTF-16 and UTF-32 and many variations there of.
No, no. UTF-8 is a variable length encoding and can represent all 1,112,064[ potential Unicode characters. RTFM. That's all you need in a sequential file. The in-memory representation of strings is usually expanded to a fixed-length character size, but that's specific to the implementation and independent of the file format.
of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. For God's sake why are we still attempting to make web page standards high level and human-readable?
Throw that shit right out the window. High-level should be handled by vendor products that compile to a standard so low-level that it really doesn't need to change more often than every few years.
One of the most disturbing things about HTML5 is the "living standard" idea. "Living standard" is the same mentality as the DVD-CCA and Region Coding.
There is no way we can trust corporations like Microsoft to act in the interest of "compatibility" for hundreds of years! They already proved themselves crooked after HTML5 - the DRM proposal was an attempt to hard-code DRM into every HTML page on the Internet!
Also note the "rating" meta tag, which is forced to use the proprietary RTA(R) system rather than self-rating by webmasters. If I self-rate my site "general" or "14 years", will I be put on a blacklist just because of a pre-HTML5 industry-decided "relic"?
Why doesn't anyone protest this trust? While fixed standards may be corrupted by Hollywood and special interests, they (like other fixed standards) are optional to use, without subjecting Web sites to the mercy of a trust?
I for one am glad there will continue to be reliable fixed standards, protecting the Internet from the long-term will of Big Government and Big Business.
will the new html standards finally allow us to copy text to the clipboard so we can actually make useful web apps. Or is this just another example of security people going too far.
If its really a security problem then I suggest a dialog that says the following:
This website would like to submit something to your clipboard. Would you like to allow the site to access your computers clipboard? yes or no.
The problem behind all this is that the technology is all wrong. HTML was a document delivery technology, it's done and should be left alone. We should move on to better things, like a web UI technology that allows the full spectrum of today's computers to blossom.
Perhaps you should upgrade off IE6 and see what the new HTML format is all about.
Yep, go for it, who needs standards? HTML5 employs thousands of website professionals every year! This new split will create even more jobs. Imagine every snot nosed, green behind the ear, kid designer using whatever technology they want to build websites for friends, family and businesses. Then when they break, not in a year or three years, but in say... oh... 48 hours and can't fix it... they hire me! I'm all for this, chaos = cashola!
What planet did you do web development on? HTML4 totally evolved (that's quite literally what the 4.x stands for - an evolution from 3.x). And what people do now is vastly different than the capabilities and vision that the W3C had in mind in 1997.
Screw HTML5. It's, what 12 years too late? Web enabled Applications are the future!
Yea everyone is saying that, love the Cloud monkier too. The future for me is never going to be an application and/or service that can ONLY be accessed via an active internet connection.
The future for many of us are applications, esp web applications, that work whether we are currently connected to the Internet or not. Let em sink up to add value when we are connected, but tying me to the net like a dog on a leash is just not going to work in my world, ever. That is DUMB.
The future means being smart. Smart means the device, whoever makes it, runs more applications on day one than the last release of that device. There are no acceptable exceptions to this rule. To do that it must be rootable.
To be smart, the device must be open, it must be rootable (allow admin access) so that the owner of the device can configure as they wish and install the software they wish on it.
I imagine purchasing only open rootable devices that will allow me to install and run, PHP, Python, Ruby, whatever I want and therefore have access to every application written in those environments the first day I purchase the device.
If a device will not allow me to install, configure, run and play the content I want/need, well it just is not smart and I will never purchase it.
If you change your answer to web enabled apps that will run standalone when not connected to the Internet/cloud, than we are in agreement...something tells me that is NOT what you were saying. Sigh.
That dog did not hunt when people started spinning it, many of us realized this from the beginning, we are just waiting for the rest of you to figure it out as well. Eventually you will be forced too, not a matter of if, only when.
If devs could have just stuck to making programs and leaving webpages static safe places to browse for information, the world would be a better place. We wouldn't have rampant malware on 99% of home user boxes. People wouldn't be throwing away good hardware and buying even cheaper PCs because they don't know how to clean off malware. PC manufacturers would actually still attempt to make hardware that lasts for longer than a year. Browsers wouldn't need constant updates to stay secure. Java wouldn't need constant updates. China wouldn't own 90% of the fortune 500's servers, Russia wouldn't be backdooring the pentagon,Etc. Etc. Etc.
HTML 5 will surely make all of this even worse, with yet more technology holes to deal with. The web could be so nice... but it'll never be anything but a cesspool of malware trash.
is that HTML4 browsers implementation is being left behind because there's a new standard. But:
1. HTML5 is not a standard at all. Not yet, at least.
2. HTML5 is not a standard but possibly two or more.
3. HTML4 sites and applications won't disappear overnight.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.