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.

Comments

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "no"?

Re: Nope

[Pseudonym Authority]

He seemed to me like a proponent of XML. I hope he catches the flu.

language

[schneidafunk]

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!

Re:language

[BForrester]

You're overstating the meerfage of sharing a common briogib. As long as the sufrabork is cognatious, the central mordage doesn't need to be the same.

what are you even saying?

[fazey]

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.

Re:what are you even saying?

[Synerg1y]

Yep, the author doesn't truly understand WHY HTML works and that's because it's interpreted by the browser a certain way. There already exist a plethora of differences between IE and firefox/chrome, de-standardizing HTML would make it impossible to create websites that look consistent to all users.

Just like the good ol' MSIE days!

[femtobyte]

<_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.

Please standardize more

[concealment]

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.

Re:HTML isn't anymore

[telchine]

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.

I agree!

I shall call this new language "Jscript"!

-Bill

Re:HTML isn't anymore

[Ultra64]

Ok, I'll take the bait. How in the hell is JavaScript *not* a programming language?

1. It is a language
2. I write programs with it

Re:HTML isn't anymore

[istartedi]

We are so close to a Web-based operating system I can taste it.

One of the things I like to say is, "In the long run, all file formats become programming languages". When somebody says they need a simple format for a config file or something, inevitably scope creep causes them to ask for something like a conditional (can you have a config setup so that if we're running offline it does this; but if the network is available it does that?). For the developer of the file format, *any* file format, it's a good idea to have a language developer's perspective.

Now, once you look at programming languages you start to get drawn into operating systems. C was developed in conjunction with Unix. Forth tends to become an operating system. Lisp, although it runs in userspace is used as a shell via Emacs and some have compared that to an OS. They talked about building Java chips at one point, and a Java OS certainly would have been written to go with it--it's only natural.

Thus I feel compelled to revise my little one-liner. "In the long run, all file formats become operating systems".

The next time the boss says he needs a flat-text config file, think about what kind of scheduling algorithm you want to use.

Re:Extending the DOM; WAI-ARIA in search engines

[phantomfive]

But how would one have implemented new HTML5 features, such as the 2D Canvas,

Simple. Each pixel is a separate div.

WebGL,

Lots and lots of divs. Lots of divs.

Re:HTML isn't anymore

[lgw]

OK, honest question about JavaScript, since I don't know it. Does JavaScript enclose blocks of code in curly-braces?

As we all know, curly braces are the One True Distinction between real profession programming languages and toy scripting languages. For example, everyone knows C# is a real profession programming language, but Visual Basic is a toy scripting language, despite offering nearly-identical functionality on top of the CLR. However, C# clearly encloses blocks of test in curly braces, and Visual Basic laughably doesn't, toy that it is!

So, let's settle this JavaScript debate once and for all: on which side of the curly braces line does it lie?