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Stop Standardizing HTML
pfignaux writes with an interesting view on the place of centralized standardization in modern browsers. From the article: "When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it's time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own markup vocabularies and processing."
Instead, the author proposes that CSS, Javascript+DOM, the W3C's accessibility framework, and Web Components are sufficient to implement the rendering of smaller, domain-specific markups.
How about "no"?
There is also a benefit to having people share a common vocabulary, such as communication in broader languages like English, Spanish, etc. I have a hard enough time communicating with people in the same language!
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Stop making our job skills transferable!
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
What was once a standard for rendering text and images together in a single document has suffered from severe scope creep over the years. With the addition of multimedia, HTML crossed the line from static to active content markup, which in my opinion defeated its original purpose. HTML needs an active companion language, an actual programming language, one that will replace the disparate third-party technologies in use today. Just eliminating Flash and Javascript for example would eliminate a vast majority of the world's browsing headaches.
We are so close to a Web-based operating system I can taste it.
If you break the html standard... each browser will interpret things even more differently than they already do. This means you now have to give a crap about what browser the visitor of your site is using, because the developers went off and did their own thing. I'm glad the author found some toys he likes... but this hardly makes an html standard useless. For example, what does this do for tomcat? What does this do for ASP.NET? The answer is nothing.
But it's working the way it is. The time-honored software way is to fix it.
<_MSIE_XZ92 MS_FONT_TP = "comic sans" Q_BINARY_BLOB = "89FF372198A" BRWSR_FOO_P = "unidiv/flimblargle">Great idea!</_MSIE_XZ92>
This post optimized for viewing with with MSIE 9.3.
The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.
We've put layers on top of that, and now it's chaos. A bloated, irregular, often incomprehensible chaos designed to allow people to make custom interfaces out of the web.
The whole point of the web, versus having an application for every specific task (like we did on desktops before the 1990s, and like we now do on smartphones), was to have a standard and simplified interface.
The web grew and thrived under that goal. It's become more corporate, nuanced, isolated, sealed-off, etc. under our "new" way.
"Instead, the author proposes that CSS, Javascript+DOM, the W3C's accessibility framework, and Web Components are sufficient to implement the rendering of smaller, domain-specific markups."
In other words, implement everything new as polyfills. But how would one have implemented new HTML5 features, such as the 2D Canvas, WebGL, and the video tag as polyfills? Even if one doesn't standardize new extensions to HTML markup, one still needs to standardize new extensions to the DOM. In addition, no new elements means that user agents that do not process script or WAI-ARIA, such as robots used by search engines, won't be able to make sense of pages. Do any current web search engines process WAI-ARIA?
CSS, HTML and JavaScript need to be standardized and built to work together. If you want to add your own libraries on then that is fine but I run into so many issues with different browsers handling my scripts differently, this is 100% due to nothing being standardized. I shouldn't have to use special operators or libraries to create the effects I want / need.
This isn't some huge problem that hasn't been resolved. Whitelist the sites that actually need it and leave Javascript disabled for all other sites. It's not difficult and it takes only a few moments to do it and reload a site when you need it.
Of course that would require a few minutes of work on your part and you seem to be too busy whining to do it.
Netscape navigator introduced the notorious BLINK tag and things like frames, back in the early days it pretty much was a free for all.
If in doubt, add one more complexity layer.
I like it. Let's just find a good name... lets see.. we can mark up everything now... so I guess we keep the "ML" part. And content authors can create new and unknown tags, the traditional symbol for unknown is X.. I know, lets call it XML!
HTML5 is the response by a bunch of whiners that normal xhtml is "too hard." Yes it's too hard to remember to close your tags. It's too hard to remember to put quotes around attributes. Why are humans checking your syntax? Have the danged computer check your syntax.
"Pave the cowpaths" is an excuse to appease a bunch of zealots that are hellbent on pushing their personal preferences and egos into a standard rather than designing something that is quick/easy to parse and universally render across platforms. It's only going to get worse as the standard is never completed over the next decade.
XML serialization of HTML sucks. It's verbose, and it's ugly. But it's effective because it's well defined and it leaves very little room for interpretation.
Honestly, I'd like to see two standards. One, is XHTML5 Strict that follows the XML serialization. This will be left to the big boys who have real work to do. The other standard would be an extension to MarkDown to allow CSS customization with classes and ids. This would allow the path the cowpaths crowd to get things down as fast as possible and keep the verbosity of XML out of their way.
His point was about web content being more dynamic than he thinks is required. A fair point, nowadays a straightforward web form with very limited scope is frowned upon if it neglects to do some sort of javascript trickery or another. He isn't after *more* capability, he seeks a more constrained experience and to have more developers exhibit a shred of restraint rather than mandate moderately more open ended access to the client facilities for superfluous bells and whistles. If a browser hangs up nowadays, it's almost certainly due to badly written javascript or javascript implementation gone insane in the face of valid javascript. Simplistic content doesn't choke up browsers and in a lot of cases, that simplicistic content model *could* suffice for the purpose. There are cases where javascript can enrich the experience beyond what is reasonable without it, but web developers immediately jump to the deep end without a second thought today.
Now, in terms of 'powerful and flexible', I'd argue that inherently it cannot hold that crown precisely because javascript is restricted from doing things like opening arbitrary filehandles and such. This isn't a bad thing, but it means the claim of 'most powerful' is flawed. Javascript is a popular language not due to having 'the' best set of capabilities or the best syntax (everyone bundles some sort of 'library' precisely to bandaid over javascripts failing at the low level), it's popular by virtue of being ubiquitous.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A computer program is defined as "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result," and a programming language defines the syntax and semantics of computer programs. So what makes a scripting language not a programming language? What makes a script not a computer program? For all I can see, JavaScript is like Lua and Python: a dynamically typed programming language that is transmitted over the wire in source code form.
If someone is hiding their content behind JavaScript walls, they don't deserve to have it indexed.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
HTML5 is riddled with faulty logic, flawed reasoning, and bad semantics. Even reading the spec gives the impression that the writing is of lesser quality than pervious versions. Why this is the case after 9 years completely baffles me.
Selected points:
Last but not least: enough with the XML hatred. XHTML5, with proper XML syntax, should be the focus instead of an afterthought. XML syntax compliance isn't that hard or time consuming. Markup languages are for machine consumption, not human readability. Not requiring tags to be closed, bare unary attributes (ie, checked instead of checked="checked") and all the other shortcuts are asinine and only foster laziness and sloppiness... which would not be tolerated in any compiled or interpreted language.
Yeah, and if people just used the amount of car they need to get from A to B, polution would plummet and fuel prices would go down and the roads wouldn't need so much maintenance. You FIRST!
The original web was designed as a gigantic book where instead of footnotes, you could click on a reference and read it from there. Everything else is fluff but it is that fluff that made the web. Want to see the original web, just browse wikipedia. It is very useful, even essential perhaps BUT it is not all of the web. All of the web is content sites that don't want you to leave for other sites. It is games, it is forums, it is applications that are on the web despite being better suited to a desktop. The web has far outgrown its original vision.
BUT it could only do this because there WAS a standard to follow. A web application being so easy to install (runs on any browser equipped machine) only works if whatever browser is installed follows a standard. The reason Gmail has long since replaced outlook express is that you need to install outlook express and configure it. With the gmail web application, you just go to the url and it just works. That could NEVER have happened if there were a dozen different browsers out there with a dozen different markup languages. Proof?
There are PLENTY of markup languages, I remember one from an old color matrix printer where you could insert color codes. .rtf is a markup language. xml is a horrid collection of them.
HTML works because anyone can look up the specs and the spec doesn't constantly change. We KNOW what happens when you let everyone create their own version, it is called IE and I will kill you before we go back to those days and not a jury in the world will convict me.
And if you want a markup language that does more? CREATE YOUR FUCKING OWN ONE! You are perfectly free to create a new type of "browser" with a new way to getting it to render data files into whatever you bloody well please. Plenty gone before you. And you know why you know of so fucking few? Because everytime somebody says "this should be a new standard" ten other people say exactly the same thing.
You can't create a new standard without getting everybody onboard and that means making compromises.
You can already extent HTML all you want, create a new element if you must but just don't claim to follow the standard strict and you are free to use whatever means you want to then render those new elements. Many common librabries already do this.
But this guy wants to take the strict standard and then add to it and then have it become the new standard. That won't work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's too verbose for him though, so he wants to be able to write this:
You'll notice that all this does is push the HTML spec into the CSS spec. I don't see much of an advantage to that. And it makes it impossible to get even a basic understanding of HTML document structure without constantly referring back to the CSS.
He also wants all new features that would previously have been implemented by adding tags to the HTML specification to be implemented by way of shims (polyfills). But who standardizes the behavior of shimmed constructs? Well, nobody. People just pick the shims they like. And because the shims are JS + CSS, the W3C is in charge of making sure the browsers execute them properly. Kind of like how today the W3C is in charge of making sure browsers execute HTML properly.
I think this guy might be happy if we got rid of every tag except <canvas> and all reusable components (e.g. <button>) came from third party vendors. E.g. <include src="http://html6.google.com/button.polyfill">. Oh boy I can't wait.
The person who came up with the way xml signatures work clearly already had some kind of disease. I'm thinking late stage syphilis.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Markup languages are for both, that's what distinguishes markup languages from, say, binary data formats. And HTML5 has parsing rules that are just as unambiguous for machine reading as XMLs, defined in the standard, and don't need the verbosity of XML to acheive it.