W3C Finalizes the Definition of HTML5

hypnosec writes "The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that it has finalized the definition of HTML5 and that it is ready for interoperability testing. HTML5 hasn't been given the status of standard yet but it is feature complete now, giving developers a stable target to develop their web applications. The W3C said in the announcement 'HTML5 is the cornerstone of the Open Web Platform" and that it provides an environment which can utilize all of a device's capabilities like videos, animations, graphics and typography. The HTML5 specifications still have a long way to go before they hit the Recommendation status. HTML5 will have to go through a round of testing that looks specifically into interoperability and performance after which time it will be given a Candidate Recommendation title."

Comments

Mayan Calendar was right

[Shikaku]

Mayan Calendar was right, it is the end of the world..

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Smallpond]

At least for Adobe.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[mcgrew]

But... I feel fine!!!

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Synerg1y]

I for one, won't miss flash player in the slightest. I've never had anything crash on me so much & I used to play Duke Nukem on win 95.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Mayan Calendar was right, it is the end of the world..

I don't know, are you certain they are going to be able to port Duke Nukem Forever to HTML5+WebGL in those few days remaining?

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe makes money by selling tools, not giving away a free content player.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I predict that Adobe will still have an Edge over their competition.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[nschubach]

cough Edge cough

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[l0ungeb0y]

Wow -- you are so sharp and witty and so absolutely right! Adobe has nothing to offer but Flash!!!

It's not like they own Phonegap for creating naive Mobile Apps with HTML5 and JS, or have their HTML5/jQuery Edge App, or do anything at all but try to promote Flash! Because Adobe is all about Flash! It's just Flash Flash Flash, all day and night for Adobe. They have no other products and boy -- are they going to get it because here comes HTML5, our lord, savior and messiah and boy -- HTML5 is gonna kill Adobe!

Adobe is so dead -- hurr-durr!

FFS -- some days ./ users just make my had effing hurt so much.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this happening. There is a lot of user-generated content, mostly games and animations that are often uploaded to third party websites, like Newgrounds. I don't think that any website on its right mind is going to allow Joe Developer to upload unverified javascript to their servers and post them publicly.

While it might be true that Canvas2D can display Flash in the enterprise environment, I don't think it can be a substitute for hobbyists who just want to publish their content. Not at this point anyway

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

On Hurd running Enlightenment.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, all the games use Flash for the HUDs (e.g., Scaleform). It isn't going away anytime soon. Same with AIR. Remember, HTML5 (also known as the 'living standard') is -years- away from duplicating the current Flash functionality. Frankly, browsers today are like the 1990s all over again - especially in the mobile market.

I realize the groupthink may not like it, but it's true.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[NatasRevol]

You don't have to manage systems that have Adobe products installed then do you?

Try it for a while; Adobe will make your had effing hurt a LOT more.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[almitydave]

Somehow I read that as "Adobe makes money by selling souls..."

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[CodeReign]

Selling tools that generate content for Flash player. It's true that now they are an established brand and will likely be able to generate review by modifying the tools to produce HTML5 media, but it will open the field for more competitors to create tools

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that any website on its right mind is going to allow Joe Developer to upload unverified javascript to their servers and post them publicly.

While it might be true that Canvas2D can display Flash in the enterprise environment, I don't think it can be a substitute for hobbyists who just want to publish their content. Not at this point anyway

Flash can contain very malicious code. If they're validating Flash content being uploaded then they'll need to validate HTML5 (if they choose to accept it). If they're not already validating Flash, well, that says a lot.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[StripedCow]

Sigh, it's 2012 and when I write a piece of software now, I'm still not sure it will run everywhere. In fact, I'm not sure if it will run tomorrow on my own system.
That's called progress?

HTML5 is so complicated from a browser implementor's point of view that we can say without doubt that there is absolutely NO implementation that adheres to the standard. And there probably never will be.

W3C should have made HTML5 simpler and more internally consistent, not more complicated. Primitives need to be simple.

In fact, HTML seems to be targeted at the novice, while forgetting about the needs of experienced developers.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Darinbob]

Until HTML5 takes over and becomes the major headache for everyone. Seriously, it's not even HTML, it's HTML plus other frameworks (codecs, javascript, etc). As much as flash is annoying, at least it's a real application and not a an ad-hoc collection of technologies making a misguided attempt to turn the browser into an application platform.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Bomazi]

I'm disappointed. I followed the link in your sig in the hope of seeing a cat/goatse/Rick Astley but all I got was an ad that matches its description. Congratulations, you invented the reverse rickrolling. That or I spend too much time on the web.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Fear the Clam]

...It's just Flash Flash Flash, all day and night for Adobe...

Of course not. They have Adobe Reader, too.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention photoshop. I mean if you 'shop' a photo, everyone knows what that means, right ?

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[dingen]

The fact Flash is "a real application" is part of the problem. The fact it is controlled by a single corporation is another. This means the public cannot decide which platforms are supported, only Adobe can.

Web applications are so great because they are made up from a collection of parts that have nothing to do with each other, but are all available on different platforms. This ensures the web is completely platform independent, which makes it a great environment for applications. Sure, they might be wonky sometimes. But at least they'll run on your every single device you own, including your TV.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[master5o1]

And PhotoShop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Edge, and other tools that don't end up requiring Flash to exist.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[dingen]

Meanwhile, in reality, mobile browsers are the most advanced browsers out there. It's the desktop ones *cough* from Microsoft *cough* that are causing problems, not the mobile space.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[dingen]

Sigh, it's 2012 and when I write a piece of software now, I'm still not sure it will run everywhere.

When were you ever sure of that?

Native applications are anything but a guarantee other people will be able to run them, they are strictly bound to the same exact device they were written for. Even releasing the source code isn't a guarantee it will run on other people's system.

Meanwhile, web applications run on anything from a PC to a phone, from a tablet to a TV set. Sure it's a living "standard" with huge gaps, sure some implementations slightly differ (and some not so slightly). But all of that is being worked on. Even now, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and nothing is released formally there is already great consensus amongst web developers on how things should be built and how they should work.

If I had to bet on whether an application would run in different time and/or space, my bet would be on the modern web application.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[_4rp4n3t]

cough Edge cough

Oh well done - you got the joke.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[narcc]

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Now we can complain about Apple causing problems with their poor standards support. (Their refusal to include support WebGL outside of iAds drives me nuts. Perhaps they feel threatened by it like they felt threatened by Flash?)

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Ambassador Kosh]

Actually mobile browsers are not the most advanced. Chrome and Firefox for the desktop are definitely more advanced than their mobile counterparts. The gap is fairly small at least usually.

IE ... well lets just kill that one already.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does that big yellow button remind me of the classic 80s crack dealer stereotype? The first one's free..

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn! A literate flasher!

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[cribera]

Qt brings you the best of world worlds. Please check http://blog.qt.digia.com/

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[VortexCortex]

Sigh, it's 2012 and when I write a piece of software now, I'm still not sure it will run everywhere.

When were you ever sure of that?

Since the 1980's when I learned C, would have said 70's, but I wasn't alive then. My C "hello world" program I wrote in 1986 on a hand me down 80286 still compiles and runs just fine on x86, x86-64, Power PC, Itanium, ARM, MIPS -- You know what? Show me a processor without a C compiler so it WON'T run on, that would be a much shorter list... That's just one example. My 1990's era hash table implementation is only now under threat of replacement because C++11 finally has one, but for over two decades my code has been operating flawlessly without modification, given I use the correct compiler flag. It's not like old C standards die.

Native applications are anything but a guarantee other people will be able to run them, they are strictly bound to the same exact device they were written for...Meanwhile, web applications run on anything from a PC to a phone

I can see that you know absolutely nothing at all. You are now aware that there are OSs that run on anything from a PC to a phone thanks to cross platform native languages like C. Indeed the "native applications" that are supposedly "strictly bound to the same exact device" are the very ones that are enabling you to run your "web applications ... on anything from a PC to a phone". Thanks for wasting yours and others time -- me? My (native) code's compiling -- Note: that's a one time cost per platform, not compiled each page load like your "web apps". Native code saves electricity, and is thus more green than web apps.
:-P

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[whydavid]

"Seriously, it's not even HTML, it's HTML plus other frameworks (codecs, javascript, etc)." So what? Does this offend you on a philosophical level? W3C already tried the "pure" approach with XHTML, and it was universally hated. HTML5 might be more of a grab-bag, but it is a direct response to what developers actually want and need. "As much as flash is annoying, at least it's a real application and not a an ad-hoc collection of technologies making a misguided attempt to turn the browser into an application platform." HTML5 is designed to be a general purpose web client development platform, so I don't see how "ad hoc" is an appropriate description. And does Flash's status as a "real application" make it any less prone to bugs, any quicker to load, or any more portable than a "fake application?" The web browser is a real application, and HTML5 represents nothing more than a standard way of providing instructions to that application. I'm not sure why you think embedding an application within an application is a more legitimate or beneficial approach. I'm not suggesting there is no value to Flash, but perhaps we can agree that there is room out there for more than one way to develop a web application?

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Waccoon]

The fact it is controlled by a single corporation is another

Yeah, in the face of Flash, all those loud-mouthed open-source guys (and other companies) did a fine job of making some good old fashioned competition.

Seriously. The alternatives to Flash were Java, millions of mal-ware infested media players, and eventually Silverlight. Everything either outright sucked, was mis-applied, or was too late to market to matter. Today, HTML5 is literally the only thing to go up against Flash, and HTML5 pretty much sucks. Just playing audio is a major challenge. just audio. That's pretty damn sad. The most revolutionary thing HTML5 has to offer is... a frame buffer? Really? It took this long?

Everyone else was wetting their pants about some mythical standards-compliant angel to come from the heavens and save us all, but they all either refused to work on it, or was too busy bitching over the proper color of the bike shed. No shit Flash took over the market.

I like Flash, despite its problems, because it actually works and works well. If it swamped the market, that was the fault of the market not responding and making something better.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seriously, it's not even HTML, it's HTML plus other frameworks (codecs, javascript, etc)." So what? Does this offend you on a philosophical level? W3C already tried the "pure" approach with XHTML, and it was universally hated."

By who? In the business world it's still the standard even with the advent of HTML5, even over XHTML5 because it's the only professional HTML spec to date that actually caters to the needs of system developers who actually build the systems people use day in and day out. Because it's great for interop, and because data flows from it trivially and seamlessly from many data sources with XSLT.

The only people who seemed to whinge about it are Joe Public because it was too complicated for them but guess what? Joe Public isn't writing markup anymore, he's using Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress and so on to publish anyway.

Don't even try and pretend HTML5 is what developers need, it's an absolute fucking headache, it's the worst HTML spec since the HTML3 days or proprietary extensions and the amount of issues you have to deal with regarding browser compatibility relating to it are a thousand fold what they were with XHTML1.

About the only developers who seem happy about it are the browser developers who apparently don't get basic concepts like separation of concerns and whom stepping away from what they know (spaghetti markup) is too much for them, and a handful of rank amateurs who also don't get how to write great software.

"The web browser is a real application, and HTML5 represents nothing more than a standard way of providing instructions to that application."

Great except implementation is anything but standard, because despite some of the browser vendors being the driving force behind HTML5 they've still completely and utterly failed to implement it consistently.

"I'm not suggesting there is no value to Flash, but perhaps we can agree that there is room out there for more than one way to develop a web application?"

That depends, do you understand why your claim that XHTML was/is universally hated is patently false? If not then no we can't agree because you have absolutely zero knowledge of the will, needs, and concerns of the bulk of back end developers today.

HTML5 is a step backwards for most developers, working with it absolutely stinks of the peak of the Netscape/IE browser wars through to the IE6 days where you had to fight for hours to get a simple thing to look and work right across browsers.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Xest]

Your last paragraph sounds great, I agree it's a nice thing to aim for in theory, but have you actually worked on any serious cross-platform HTML5 projects in practice? It's a fucking nightmare.

I actually really, really hate Flash such that I've always refused to learn it and still refuse to, but we've actually had to resort to Flash on some projects because it's still the easiest way to implement cross-browser unified web experiences. HTML5 projects work poorly across different browsers and platforms.

HTML5s only real strength seems to be for building mobile web pages, on the desktop HTML5 still works and looks completely different between Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, but even on mobile it's hardly the unified development dream we were sold it to be by WHATWG - far from it. Web development now, with HTML5 is more awkward than I remember it being for many many years because of the countless inconsistencies.

The fundamental issue is that like you say, "they might be wonky sometimes" but how is that different to older versions of (X)HTML? HTML5 is just more of the same - more features that don't work right/consistently between platforms, but because there's so much of it, if you try to use any sizeable number of new HTML5 features then you'll end up with more of an inconsistent clusterfuck than ever before. Or in other words, nothings changed, you could always use a minimal set of HTML/CSS features and get a page to work on all devices, and as you added more the inconsistencies grew, that's still the case, HTML5 doesn't change that, it just adds more inconsistencies to fuck things up with.

Honestly, your last paragraph is noble sounding but you're ultimately just parroting WHATWG's marketing blurb, and they simply didn't manage to live up to the hype they sold in practice with the production of HTML5. The end product is really quite a train wreck, partly because the spec was badly produced, partly because no matter how good the spec, browser vendors are still utterly shit at their job, and shit at achieving a decent degree of interop between each other's offerings.

I do agree with the GP, between current browsers being such a quagmire of shite as the codebases have become ever more screwed up with the addition of new features over the years, and the fact that HTML and related technologies were never really designed with the complexity of webapps people ask for in mind today, we'd be far better off if we just kept HTML as a web document format, and created a new set of technologies for web applications. I've mentioned it before, it could still interop with HTML, using say, app:// as a new protocol running alongside HTTP allowing linking and so forth between HTML pages and apps to work seamlessly, but ultimately the web isn't going to move in the direction people want it to move in unless some ground up technology like this is built.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[icebraining]

Note: that's a one time cost per platform, not compiled each page load like your "web apps". Native code saves electricity, and is thus more green than web apps.

Native applications are not the same as native code. You can write "web apps" in native code just fine, see e.g. Wt or Go.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[dingen]

That's still just the server-part though. Client-side code (i.e. Javascript) is compiled on every use.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Alioth]

Well, it works but badly. If I suspect something's chewing up lots of CPU time on my computer and take a look at what's running, it is almost always Flash that's maxing out one or more cores. Closing the browser tabs with Flash applications isn't enough to stop it, either - the browser must be closed to kill off all the flash processes.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[icebraining]

That depends on the JavaScript VM; some cache the generated machine code (even across different websites).

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1096907/do-browsers-parse-javascript-on-every-page-load?lq=1

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[gbjbaanb]

It's not like they own Phonegap for creating naive Mobile Apps with HTML5 and JS,/i>

you're referring to Apache Cordoba right?

Kudos to Adobe for giving it to the Apache Foundation though, they get a lot of bad press - mainly because of crappy Flash-based adverts - but they deserve a bit better. Only a bit mind, if they release a version of Flash without security flaws or Reader that opens quickly without a mass of 'features'.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not mutually exclusive.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

millions of people in the real world (allow me to introduce you) have no such issues with flash. would youtube and flash gaming be quite so popular otherwise?

as to duke nukem, that never crashed on me either.
maybe you were running your prized bonzi buddy in the background?

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

well it's time for the web to drop flash then isn't it? simple really.

I've noticed that the only people that seem to moan perpetually about flash are apple and linux users, and the latter not so much.

the idea that these small groups do not represent the interests of everyone that chooses to use the internet is clearly pretty hard to grasp, but surely the utter failure of html5 might give you a hint that this particular tree is not worth barking up?

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

CHARLIE, tus angeles de Lima-Perú te extrañan...

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Synerg1y]

Rofl, for a troll you sound new....00b. To see flash player crash, try this: windows key + right arrow + enter.

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm I guess you've never heard of a little thing called creative suite...

Re:Mayan Calendar was right

[Waccoon]

It's a hidden blessing that Flash only uses a single core. On a single core, Flash will bring a computer to its knees, but a dual core processor will barely be affected at all. If Flash eventually supports multiple cores, then heaven help us.

Incidentally, it's actually braindead developers that are responsible for Flash being so slow. All they have to do is add a few wait states to their code and the problem disappears. I've actually seen a number of Flash games that were programmed properly, and will not use more than 3% of my CPU time, despite running at 60 FPS. True, it would be nice if Flash had a built-in way to throttle the performance of content, but... no HTML5 I'm aware of has a mechanism for doing this, either. Firefox certainly doesn't, despite having a Flash container process.

I'm always amused when people bash Flash for sucking up CPU time. If an HTML5/JS application goes into a badly-written tight loop waiting for input, it will max out the CPU, too... and will likely do so on all cores. Will a switch to HTML5 automatically fix code with tight loops? Of course not. Thus, I don't think it's reasonable to blame Flash for badly written apps, either. It's the responsibility of the client platform to manage process priority (the web browser is the OS of the future? Yeah, right. Even memory management poses a challenge to many modern web browsers!)

As for working badly, one thing I liked about Flash many years ago was that it was a paltry ~300K download that didn't require a full installer. It "just worked", when other things like Java weighed in at 15+ MB and were a PITA to install. Also, Flash content is almost always packaged into a single file, making content easy to download and archive for offline use (such as cartoons and games). Try that with HTML5 or Java. There is no official packaging format for HTML/CSS/JS, so archiving content consisting of hundreds of files with tons of cross-links is a lot more difficult today than in the HTML3 days. Even Java figured out that packaging was important with the JAR file format. With GZip compression becoming standard on most web servers these days, why can't HTML5 get an official packaging format? More complaining about it being against a free Internet or some other impractical crap?

W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[tyrione]

Seeing as the actual architects of HTML 5 come from Apple and Google and neither of those corporations are mentioned reminds me how if it weren't for Apple and Google we'd be screwed in a never ending cycle of XML/XHTML/ crap.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[loufoque]

XHTML 2.0 was actually much better than this crap, but it's not an iterative improvement, it's a whole new language altogether.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[StripedCow]

if it weren't for Apple and Google we'd be screwed in a never ending cycle of XML/XHTML/ crap

Indeed, thanks to Apple, we now have "apps".

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[Anonymous Coward]

It was only "better" on paper (in theory) in some aspects. Without usable implementations in browsers, and wide testing of web content written in it, it's impossible to know if the benefit of its design is actually really better than HTML5.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[Anonymous Coward]

RISC OS

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[tyrione]

XHTML 2.0 was actually much better than this crap, but it's not an iterative improvement, it's a whole new language altogether.

Not hardly. XHTML 2.0 is a pain in the ass. The entire XML child spawn of crap was nothing but overhead.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[mikael_j]

While every standard has its issues I'm really hoping your hatred of XML/XHTML isn't the usual one. That is, that the "problem" with XHTML and XML is that parsers simply refuse to deal with broken XML/XHTML*, as far as I'm concerned that's a feature, not a bug.

* I've heard complaints about this many times, the core complaint seems to be "well, now I have to write markup that's actually standards-compliant and that's just too hard! I want HTML that will render even if it's horribly broken!"

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[loufoque]

Wether it is XML or SGML hardly changes anything with regards to performance.

The evolution of XHTML 2.0 was to ditch compatibility and move to semantic document markup.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[Daengbo]

I really want to see Packaged Apps take off across all browsers, mobile and desktop. I'm willing to take a little performance hit to have apps available across all platforms.

Re:W3C Testimonials Members list on HTML 5 funny

[chronokitsune3233]

"well, now I have to write markup that's actually standards-compliant and that's just too hard! I want HTML that will render even if it's horribly broken!"

Of course they do. They miss the days of things like the following when they move to XML/XHTML, and I only added the doctype to get rid of "quirks mode" in IE:

<!DOCTYPE HTML "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<title>Page Title</title>
<p>Under construction!<br>(Isn't it pretty?)

Instead, you have this with XHTML:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Under construction!<br />(Isn't it pretty?)</p>
</body>
</html>

For the most part, that's about as minimal as you can get in both cases while still having some content. There is no indication of language, so it could be English or Arabic or whatever. The character set and MIME type are both missing as well, so either of those documents could be a Windows-1252 document with text/html by default or perhaps a KOI8-R document with application/xhtml+xml, regardless of validity.

The point is that XHTML encourages more easily read mark-up. For example, the only way to know that a paragraph (<p> tag) ends in HTML is when a non-inline element (e.g. the DIV element or </body>) is encountered or when its end tag (</p>) is encountered.

The only point that I dislike is that you cannot have paragraphs inside paragraphs. If you have logical divisions such as a paragraph with a quote inside that contains multiple paragraphs, you must (logically) split it up into multiple paragraphs. Alternatively, the blockquote element was supposed to remedy such a situation. You'd end your paragraph and use a blockquote element after that to contain the quote.

That is the big reason why I really liked XHTML 2.0. It had some actual useful improvements. Another example is the combination of section and the generic h elements rather than people using h1 first, then h2 second, etc. Those were old concepts that differed only by presentation in rendering, which could be fixed thanks to the invention of CSS. In other words, you could use h6 first, then h3 second, then h2 third, etc. and use CSS to change how they appeared, making them less semantic because any heading element would do. Also, the "any element can be a link" idea was really nice!

One downside to XHTML 2.0 was the fact that it involved so many working groups. XForms, XFrames, XML Events, Ruby, RDFa, etc. I think XHTML should have stuck to semantics. Others could have been included using namespaces. Additionally, XFrames and XML Events had to be finished in order for XHTML 2.0 to be finished, so it was a simple case of having too much to do with so little time in which to do it. And of course there were the little things that still needed attention like how generic things ought to be. After simplifying h1, h2, etc. to combinations of section and h elements, why not do the same with lists? After all, it's a general construct, right? Why have specific things for lists when they can be used for shopping or whatever, ordered or not? In case nobody knows about it, I'm referring to this proposal, which got some official replies on IRC and resulted in this e-mail and this response to that e-mail.

The "need to discuss the principle, and the philosophy" was a big part of what made XHTML 2.0, and I think that was its real downfall. It was very slow-moving because it was to define the building blocks of the Semantic Web, and what exactly was needed t

Incorrect

[Bogtha]

It is by no means finalised. This is like a beta. It's feature complete, now they've got to shake out the interoperability bugs between implementations. During this phase, they can discover that there are flaws or omissions within the specification, which will entail changes to the specification. When they have multiple interoperable implementations, then it will be finalised.

Re:Incorrect

[HexaByte]

Yes, but at least now we can program towards a standard that the browsers cannot properly interpret because they aren't built to that standard.

That way we can work out the bugs of figuring out if the bug is the browser or the standard.

Re:Incorrect

[Synerg1y]

How is this different from past revisions? That's just how it is, if you don't read the spec, and go to use a datetime input and wonder why it doesn't work in ie7, well... hopefully you can google the answer. I remember when css3 first rolled around, it featured tons of almost mission critical enhancements, and about 10% of browsers actually took advantage of it, so you had a bit of double coding going on: css3 code for newer browsers, same / similar / lack of design feature in older browsers. Since then, support has gone to more like 95% or so with new versions of firefox, chrome, safari, IE that are all css3 compliant.

Re:Incorrect

[Billly Gates]

Ha!

Good luck trying to get these corps who just blew $10,000,000 upgrading to IE 8 in the last 6 months to throw out their investment because some geeks want cool translucent and animated css 3 divs. Try convincing old people and those who got hit hard in the great recession who are underemployed and work at Walmart (20% of the workforce still!) who are stuck with XP and IE 8 and can't afford a new computer?

HTML 5 is going no where until 2019 or 2020 when Windows 7 hits EOL sadly.

Maybe I am a pessimist but after seeing how the horrible IE 6 lived on for year after year last decade I see why change what works? IE 8 is more secure and doesn't crash as easily so there will be pressure to hold onto IE 8 longer than IE 6.

Intranet apps today still do not follow w3c. Only old MS standards.

Re:Incorrect

[SB9876]

I know, right? It's such a shame that MS won the browser wars and killed off the competition.

Re:Incorrect

[Billly Gates]

So IE has a 0% marketshare!

I can just tell any client ignore 20% of your sales from these users? Wow ...

No they wont change as they are set in their ways and many do not know what a browser is. That blue E is how you get to Google is all they know. Many do not want to install software they never heard off and find that act threatening! IE is what they know it works and if you do not support it on your website a competitor will.

The corps in my example above have intranet apps that only work in IE 6 or IE 8. Fat chance they will use something else after spending millions leaving IE 6 which works fine to IE 8 so you can have pretty divs in ohhh and ahhh HTML 5 and css 3 glory.

HTML 4 and flash are both here to stay for a very long time.

Re:Incorrect

[VGPowerlord]

Good luck trying to get these corps who just blew $10,000,000 upgrading to IE 8 in the last 6 months

I certainly hope that if they were spending money to upgrade in the last 6 months that it'd be to upgrade to IE9, not 8.

Re:Incorrect

[Synerg1y]

1. upgrading IE is free in regards to licensing, proper WSUS probably puts it at several thousand in regards to man hours at best.
2. you can't stop people from being retarded, if you don't know how to upgrade your browser from IE 6, you probably don't care about css3 shadowing on my web page either.
3. There is no compelling reason to make an intranet app follow w3c, and certain older versions of Visual Studio were well known to produce IE only friendly code that was never to standard to begin with (upper case tags ex) . An international website... a bit more compelling to do so for obvious reasons.

And just because I thought this was cool: Test your browser's HTML5 compatibility

Keep learning, you'll get it one day :)

Re:Incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Until IE 8 represents less than 5% marketshare you need to ignore this decade and live in the last one. IE 9 is not free to upgrade as most new software is not compatible with it. You can thank MS for Vista and bean counters for keeping XP around too long. As a result IE 8 is entrenched firmly as the only browser that works on both operating systems.

Since IE 8 uses jscript and not javascript you can forget about these apps working on any modern browsers.

Users too see no reason to leave XP and will continue to use IE 8.

This is a big problem and why phones have a supperior visual experience over pcs

Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[UnknownSoldier]

What is this an RPG ??

And still no standard support for 3D ?

Anyone know if the mouse being constrained to a window made it into the draft?

*sigh*

Re:Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[nschubach]

The only "sane" reason I can think off the top of my head for being able to constrain the mouse to the window is for 3D (mouselook). What other reason would they allow that?

Re:Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[StripedCow]

Attracting your attention in advertisements?

Re:Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd absolutely not want some JavaScript running in the web browser to be able to constrain my mouse to a window. It has far to much potential for abuse.

Re:Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[UnknownSoldier]

It would need to be OPT IN obviously controlled by the user + browser.

Re:Canvas 2D, Level 2 ??

[MatrixCubed]

Actually, yes, it is an RPG.

Yay

[vawarayer]

Yay!

Title

[girlintraining]

W3C Finalizes the Definition of HTML5

I don't know why, but I read that initially as "W3C Demonizes the Definition of HTML5". I like my version better. For web developers, the idea of yet another standard to make their site compatible with probably earns the W3C the special hell they reserve for child molesters, standards body members, and people who speak in theatre. Shiny.

w3c

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks my friend.

Re:w3c

[Spy Handler]

you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

typical

[ssam]

I have only just finished reading the HTML4 spec.

Re:typical

[magic maverick]

Do you work for MS on the IE team or something? That seems like the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from them...

How far are you into the CSS2 spec? I know, I know, you've only had 14 years to read it, and that's not quite long enough, and CSS2.1 is only just "finished" last year.

*graphy

[Anonymous Coward]

did anyone else first read pornography instead of typography?

Re:*graphy

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You're watching the 2012 Olympics Logo too much.

Re:*graphy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I read it as "pornos, animated porn, pornography and typography".

Codec?

[l2718]

Could you state the final decision regarding elements?

Quick!

[Krojack]

Someone get a copy of this over to Microsoft's IE dev dept!

Re:Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone get a copy of this over to Microsoft's IE dev dept!

Did you mean to reply to this post instead:

I have only just finished reading the HTML4 spec.

Re:Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they even have a birdcage?

Does anyone really care any more?

[Anonymous Coward]

WHATWG done all the work anyway.
W3C wanted to wreck the way for the sake of appeasing some XML morons.

I think everyone pretty much agreed nobody cares for W3C around the middle of the year did they not?
Citing the "old, mumbling fool in his old, slow ways" example.

HTML as a living standard pretty much brings it in line with CSS and JS.
Yes, they are. Really?
Nice CSS selection you have there. (literally has none because it was actually designed correctly from the start as additive and "non-chaining-dependant syntax" that could cause problems if things were removed)
What's what, JS version selection? Does little difference. You are limiting yourself pointlessly since they all operate together.
There IS an exception with JS coming up that will need a version to use because it changes internal features in such a major way, but this will being JS fully in to line of being capable of being added to without screwing up compatibility, just like the way CSS and HTML just became. (and all stuff in general with even Microsoft agreeing to use browser prefixes for testing out possible future features, and internal stuff)
Only HUGE major changes need version revisions, and for the sake of HTML, it seriously doesn't need that any more since the new baseline has been set for the additive semantic web markup language future. (SWML might as well be the name since it is such a huge change)

"it is ready for interoperability testing"

[DrStrangluv]

Odd. Some of us have been "testing" it in production for quite a while now.

Most browsers will use HTML6 when HTML5 is done

[Anonymous Coward]

And no browsers will follow the standard 100% and with weekly updates you'll never know.

Re:Most browsers will use HTML6 when HTML5 is done

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you were one of those in 1999 that declared most browsers will use HTML5 when HTML4 is done.

versioning will never fix fundamental flaw

[PJ6]

HTML and anything like it is the wrong thing to put a standards body on. Authoring (human "readable") is a level in the abstraction chain where innovation and competition is supposed to occur, not this ponderous shit. Sticking with HTML as the standard has easily set us back ten years from where we could have been, and I fear it will continue to stifle innovation for decades to come.

Re:versioning will never fix fundamental flaw

[Anonymous Coward]

As to what? Javascript?

Re:versioning will never fix fundamental flaw

[Sigg3.net]

I'd say the HTML saga did the opposite of stifling innovation. It strongly encourages it.

It does stifle productivity more often than not though.

Re:versioning will never fix fundamental flaw

[PJ6]

As to what? Javascript?

I bet you've never, ever used a unit test in your life.

A whole generation, ruined.

Marble Madness

[tepples]

The only "sane" reason I can think off the top of my head for being able to constrain the mouse to the window is for 3D (mouselook). What other reason would they allow that?

For any activity that uses gestures on the trackball, trackpad, or mouse other than moving the cursor to a specific point within the viewport. One example of such a gesture is controlling the speed of the ball in Marble Madness or Bobby Bearing.

A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[Kergan]

I hate to be writing this, but if it hadn't been for Firefox fighting a losing war for ogg for the video tag (as in duh, who builds hardware for that when x264 is the de facto standard?!?), this article would likely have appeared on Slashdot a half dozen years ago.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not an unreasonable thing to push for on an open web, given the non-open nature of h264.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[zarlino]

You'll hate *much* more the day the H.264 licensing moster raises its ugly head.

Next round for starting asking for licensing fees is 2015
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. There are many new additions with HTML5 and the codec choice was just one major visible fight among countless small decisions on tags, attributes, DOM, etc.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[tyrione]

You'll hate *much* more the day the H.264 licensing moster raises its ugly head.

Next round for starting asking for licensing fees is 2015 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing

Which won't happen. The patent holders have too much invested in hardware to cut off their noses to spite their face.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[westlake]

You'll hate *much* more the day the H.264 licensing moster raises its ugly head.
Next round for starting asking for licensing fees is 2015

Royalty increases max out to 10% per five year term. H.264 royalties are for all practical purposes of no concern to all but the largest commercial distributers of H.264 hardware and content. The geek may have noticed that Chrome still supports H.264 with no changes in prospect and Firefox will support it when video hardware supports it --- and hardware support for H.264 is universal.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. That didn't happen with GIF.

Re:A half dozen years late courtesy of Firefox...

[Microlith]

Except when dedicated h.264 hardware isn't available. I don't recall having any such decoder in my desktop. Oops, looks like I don't get h.264 support. Worse if you don't run Windows or OS X, then you're perpetually in a legal grey area.

Personally I think even the buzzword is a misnomer

[yuhong]

http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/07/why-html5-buzzword-is-misnomer.html

Write once, runs anywhere ?

[Taco Cowboy]

If my memory still serves me correctly, one of the promise of HTML5 is "Write Once, Runs Anywhere" .

I dunno about you, but as a developer, I still find that "Write Once, Runs Anywhere" promise not-yet-fulfilled

Wonder if this final draft will bring about the final fulfillment of that promise?

Re:Write once, runs anywhere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still find that "Write Once, Runs Anywhere" promise not-yet-fulfilled

Qt is pretty good about that, assuming you don't use any OS-specific API calls. True, Qt won't run on every tablet/smartphone ever made but it covers Windows, Mac, and Linux pretty well.

Re:Write once, runs anywhere ?

[cribera]

I still find that "Write Once, Runs Anywhere" promise not-yet-fulfilled

Qt is pretty good about that, assuming you don't use any OS-specific API calls. True, Qt won't run on every tablet/smartphone ever made but it covers Windows, Mac, and Linux pretty well.

MOD PARENT UP PLEASE.

However, you forgot to add ANDROID support.

Check https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/android-qt

And in 2013, iOs tier1 support ins in the pipeline, as well as Android (Necessitas project is still Beta, but apps built upon it are pretty solid already).

HTH

Re:Write once, runs anywhere ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want software that runs on as many machines as possible, write it in NES compatible 6502 assembler.
Virtual machines for those are more supported than Java, Flash and HTML combined.

Re:Write once, runs anywhere ?

[Daengbo]

Like Java -- "Write once; debug everywhere."

Unfortunately it's insecure by design

[Anonymous Coward]

https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/Briefings/Shah/BH_US_12_Shah_Silent_Exploits_WP.pdf