W3C Announces Plan To Deliver HTML 5 by 2014
The World Wide Web Consortium has proposed "a new plan that would see the HTML 5 spec positioned as a Recommendation—which in W3C's lingo represents a complete, finished standard—by the end of 2014. The group plans a follow-up, HTML 5.1, for the end of 2016." Instead of working toward one-specification-to-rule-them-all in 2022, features that are stable and implemented in multiple browsers now will be finalized as HTML 5.0 by 2014 with unstable features moved into HTML 5.1 (developed in parallel). In 2014, the commonly implemented parts of HTML 5.1 will begin finalization for 2016, with the unstable parts moved into HTML 5.2 (wash, rinse, repeat). Additionally, things like Web Sockets are being moved into their own modular standards (sound familiar?) for "...the social benefits that accrue from such an approach. Splitting out separate specifications allows those technologies to be advanced by their respective communities of interest, allowing more productive development of approaches that may eventually be able reach broader consensus."
Wow, let's not rush into anything here guys.
Just in time for the first HTML6 browsers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm pretty sure the entire community pretty much shafted them a couple months ago, did they not?
Well, besides the people who still think you need a version to target.
You have no problems with CSS and JS, there are no version controls in either of those, why the problem with HTML?
HTML was very specifically rewritten TO BE versionless with the new markup. The other ones had a plethora of meaningless containers.
They thought hard and well about exactly which basic main elements would be needed and implemented them very well. Any new ones needed will just get slapped on board like any other thing. (LIKE IT IS NOW, don't see you whining when all those other things were added outside of versions!)
Which bit is the Fear, which is the Uncertainty and which is the Doubt? Or are you just using FUD as a synonym for "bad" for no apparent reason?
I wonder if it will even matter anymore?
With everyone willingly giving up everything to go into walled gardens, and the obvious superiority of native code applications*, is HTML5 a dead end?
Discuss! (ha)
* Not saying that pretty much all apps on smartphones I've used aren't buggy, featureless, poorly designed piece of shit--they are--so much so. And I love the openness of using web sites and never having to need to update my software. I love it. I'm just saying they have the *potential*.
So basically it's the browser vendors that eventually determine what goes in and what stays out? How much of an influence will Internet Explorer have on this?
Finalize the things that we already have, this long-stretched process is already hurting the web.
And by 2019, all the browsers on the market may actually support it consistently, just like they did with HTML2, HTML3, HTML4! (that was sarcastic for the sarcasm challenged).
Seriously, the world wide web and HTML itself are just a series of horrible bits of sticky tape which no longer stick to anything and string that is very frayed. It's like a train in India (most of the passengers on the outside). It only works by some remarkable coincidence of the same order of magnitude of how life managed to evolve on this planet. Every client interprets it differently. Every client displays it differently. Every server serves it differently. Security was an afterthought. HTML5 suddenly being ratified and published isn't going to make these problems go away.
For ref, this is not because I don't get it. I've been kicking out web applications on and off for 16 years. Even desktop development with Swing is beautiful compared to this crapfest.
Someone just needs to fix it (no XKCD 927 here please :).
Can we get rid of Flash, now?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Fucked Up Discourse, may be?
Seriously, though, all those enthusiastic talks about "You just write an HTML5 webapp once and run it everywhere! Just think about all those modern browsers and mobile devices you could target at once!" a few years ago, since about iPhone 1 introduction, and still nothing useful outside of simple browser games and webtoys.
Graphics APIs are pretty stable, but more than that? Web audio API's getting standardized, but it's still quite raw. And using it on mobile devices? Out of question.
Writing files? You wish! Accessing all the various input devices like cameras, gamepads, microphones or accelerometers? Hah. Peer-to-peer connections? Suuure.
The Duke Nukem of markup languages
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Someone will always want the <blink> tag.
As I see it, the <blink> element is presentational and should ideally be implemented with CSS text-decoration:blink or with a CSS animation on an element's opacity. It could gain a retconned semantic meaning, just as the <b>, <i>, <s>, and <hr> elements did in HTML5, but I don't see what that meaning would be.
If you want something to run cross platform, and don't have any taxing performance requirements, [HTML5] is an easy way to go.
So how should an HTML5 app on current devices access the device's camera or microphone?
What format for vector animations, such as the Homestar Runner short films, are you proposing that is superior to Flash?
And this is a huge problem for me as well, as I'm working on a project hoping for something better out of HTML5.
Streaming video with sensitivity to bandwith is something not available in the HTML5 spec at all. It's a simple "video" tag, which offers very little flexibility. h.264 will be the standard, VP8 is effectively dead. And that's fine, but when you have a situation where you want to auto adjust the quality based on bandwith (ala Silverlight "Smooth Streaming" or Flash), you can't do it in HTML5.
There's a project in works called MPEG DASH to do something around this, but that project is moving slower than molasses. I think people are content to keep using Flash or Silverlight, but in reality.. developers really want better options and HTML5 is already an archaic standard in a lot of senses.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
just in time when w3c will declare it obsolete in favor of the new one, HTML6.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
But you can write files.
And you can access various input devices now.
P2P is also working, if at the experimental stages.
Keep up. (these are also half a year old now, I haven't checked their status since then)
I'm really worried. I've actually said the W3C should do everything they're going to do. It's not like the world is gaining sanity, which means I'm the one going insane.
I'm wondering what they'll be doing for the doctype declaration though, since it doesn't indicate any version (which is short sighted in my opinion)
Doesn't anyone have problem with the full source code being available? I mean if you develop with HTML5 and JS the full source is there. I think companies might have a problem with that.
Don't worry; your proprietary HTML5 and JS code is protected by copyright.
Doesn't anyone have problem with the full source code being available?
Why would the source being open be a problem? If I'm running something blindly off the internet, I want to know what it's doing. I take it you're not a fan of open source software? If the source is closed, how can you trust the code? I'll take open source over closed any day.
Free Martian Whores!
hmm i wonder if adobe will start selling a modified version their drm scheme that is currently used on pdf's and epub's as a drm scheme for HTML5, CSS, and Javascript?
PS i here by patent drm schema implemented on web-scripting languages,
PSS and on a mobile device
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You still have to build separate packages for different platforms
And pay each platform's annual fee. A $99 per platform per year fee adds up, especially if you're trying to provide a $0.00 app across iOS, Windows Phone, and Amazon Appstore.
I'm surprised it's still around consider it was just a naive hack, it could easily be out done on technical merits by a single average programmer.
I tell ya, this new generation who doesn't care to optmizing anything. Lets just write the crappiest software we can and throw more money at the problem...
And no, not everyone will have fiber to their home. They may have 20mbs internet via copper but they won't have fiber unless everybody chips in $1000 per home (Not even sure that would cover it)
If these people we would have college age newborns!
Which part of all those are cross-platform? FileWriter, AFAICR, is still Chrome only, accessing various input devices is done in a bunch of various ways with various and rather poor support across browsers, P2P is, as you said, "at the experimental stages".
I do keep up, and their status doesn't progress much. It's been almost a decade since HTML5 began and half a decade since smartphones and tablets revolution, crossplatform webapps are still out of reach.
They missed the train. There was a chance to ride on the wave of mobile adoption, but now it seems to be too late, as everyone's content with native apps and crossplatform SDKs to write them. Sure, not as easy to deploy as a webpage, but simple enough and - that's important too - easy to take payments.
I'm not up on this stuff, but is there a way to "require" the browser makers to conform to the W3C standards? Or is it strictly voluntary in so much as they want to appeal to as many people as possible? Is the only "punishment" getting lambasted by Web developers and seeing a down-tick in usage?
IMO minified JS is not much different in this regard from java or flash. Both Java and Flash can be readilly decompiled back to something resembling source code.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Doesn't anyone have problem with the full source code being available? I mean if you develop with HTML5 and JS the full source is there. I think companies might have a problem with that.
I work on several widely used web apps. One uses GWT, the others minify and obfuscate their javascript (https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/) to make it download faster. Both methods produce javascript that is about as readable as the output of a C compiler. I can't think of any reason to care that people can read our HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS only contain information the user can see and read. We have no reason to keep that secret.
In a past life I worked on chip design software, written in C++ and shipped as a binary on Solaris and AIX. A one year licence cost 80k$. We did have problems where customers tried to disassemble our binaries to find out how we computed some information, and write their own versions. This is less of a problem with web stuff, because it is so cheap that cracking it is not worth a competent person's time. If you really want something to stay secret, have the web app make a request to a server you control. This is more protection than we had when every program was shipped as a binary.
The semantic meaning of the element according to W3C's HTML5 draft is a paragraph-level tHematic bReak.
.... Perl 6 will be produciton-ready before we see a HTML5 standard.
People watch animations on Youtube now. It's 2012, we have the bandwidth.
Not necessarily. It's 2012, people are watching on laptops and tablets, and mobile broadband plans are still limited to 5 GB per month on the whole. Even some home Internet providers, such as HughesNet and WildBlue, still have caps (or "fair access policies") that amount to single digit GB per month. I tried converting an SWF to a video, and it became ten times bigger. This means if you can watch x number of SWFs on Newgrounds on a 5 GB/mo plan, you'd need a 50 GB/mo plan to watch the same SWFs converted to video.
For another thing, YouTube videos are not interactive, unlike Flash games. Games would need to use HTML5 canvas, which has drawbacks that I mentioned in my reply to Anonymous Coward.
... why doesn't the W3C make a browser (or a rendering engine) that implements 100% of the spec 100% perfectly? (No, Amaya isn't quite it.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I just wish they could agree on something. I spent 30 minutes the other night on the phone with my father who was trying to register some new space heater, and the website wasn't written properly, and the java script never would display properly. Once I closed out his browser and opened a different one, it then worked properly. Either that, or ban java script....Some sites, I have to work between 3 browsers, depending on which one works with a certain site.
Basically HTML 5 is getting lapped by Android's Java api, Apples Objective-C/LUA api, and even MSs .NET/Silverlight api's on the respective platforms. All of these have everything and more than what HTML 5 has. And yes they are more responsive and have better state management and a whole lot of others thing. Wouldn't it be nice if had some kind of standard local cookies...we could if local storage got adopted, but again the same stupid problems.
Steve was so right about Flash wasn't he. Yah right...he knew HTML 5 was stuck in the mud and now we yet again have lock in. I have to buy a damn MacBook just so I can write a damn page with a video, camera control, etc.
We could bang out a better version of Flash before most of these tags get fixed and have full browser support in no time flat. Is everyone so against plugins still? Can't we just get better sandboxes? Would it really be that hard for Google to bang out a Flash like plugin, with like video support, get it ported to FF and IE etc, and start promoting it. Imagine if it used Javascript as the language...or better yet itself had a language plugin system so we could write them in any language.
Even the page you pointed to has Chrome listed as supporting it.
Then the page I pointed to must be wrong. I visited this demo in Chrome for Android (version 18.0.1025308) on my Nexus 7 and got the error message "Your browser doesn’t support all required features: WebRTC getUserMedia". I visited the same demo in Chromium Browser for GNU/Linux (version 18.0.1025.168) on my computer and got the same error message. Might it have something to do with the message "Requires this prefix to work" that I get when I hover over Chrome's entry?
You should tell that to ARM who've integrated VP8 Hardware Encoder/Decoder into their A15 SoC. Let them know that so the 1000's of Apache Servers they'll be powering won't have any VP8 content to decode.... hahaha... Just remember the Web Content Service is OWNED by Apache Web Servers! ......Remember ARM is now going into the Server Business against Intel! ....and they only like to use Linux and Free Open Source formats, systems and utilities.
Remember that YouTube OWNS ONLINE VIDEO CONTENT and are as Ubiquitous at that as they are SEARCH. Soon they will have their YouTube App for iOS in the App Store. That's when they'll switch off the h.264 server switch. It's coming it's a fact and when that happens you better have a Video Player capable of decoding VP8 on any iOS device! Which means YouTube Native App!!!
In fact you better have a Player capable of decoding and encoding at least with software and Neon Core (ARM) support (at least you're clear there w/ ARM chips). Remember that YouTube's Native App coming to the App Store will be streaming VP8! Don't like it? ......then tough shizt. Because when Google let Apple's contract lapse, they did it on purpose to take back control user's experience along with giving iOS users better control under a VP8 Video Player! The Future is here... and it's NOT h.264 under MPEG LA, who is still under investigation by the DOJ! ........want to know why they aren't suing anybody? That would be the killing blow to they being in business and their CEO locked behind bars!!! GET OUT of YOUR APPLE MICROSOFT LOVING ARSE..... BEFORE IT STINKS YOU OUT!
The only hardware manufacturer NOT supporting VP8 with a Dedicated Hardware Encoding and Decoding Chip is Intel! .........will they? Well AMD will include Hardware decoding for both formats. But the reality is that if all your competitors are choosing VP8, you will too eventually! ;-P ......because not only will you have to pay MPEG LA eventually, but Motorola Google too.... both own separate claims on H.264 from MPEG LA Group. Remember again..... MPEG LA CEO is still being investigated for threats to gather a group of VP8 related patents. What did he get? Google submitting him to DOJ for investigation. Until that gets cleared up, expect H.264 to be in jeopardy...... not WebM and VP8. Because once you have all the hardware makers on your side. The software and content owners (MPAA, etc) are compelled by force to simply follow along!!! lol..... After Google Samsung release Nexus 11.8 better than Retina Screen Tablet PC powered by Exynos 5250 Dual ARM A15 with only support for h.264 being in the Neon Engine, that dedicated VP8 decoder in it, will signal the end of h.264 ever getting snuck into HTML5! ;-)