It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard

rjmarvin (3001897) writes The Worldwide Web Consortium today has elevated the HTML5 specification to 'recommendation' status , giving it the group's highest level of endorsement, which is akin to becoming a standard. The W3C also introduced Application Foundations with the announcement of the HTML5 recommendation to aid developers in writing Web applications, and said the organization is working with patents holders of the H.264 codec to agree on a baseline royalty-free interoperability level commitment.

Comments

Well, that's cool I guess

[halivar]

But it's already a de facto standard. I think W3C's clout in this area is diminished because the market already decided it was a standard long before they did.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[tuffy]

Turning de facto standards that have been implemented in actual browsers into a formal specification is how standards work best.

Coming up with a specification first and hoping someone will be able to implement it is how we wound up with Perl 6.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[cloud.pt]

Your'e not giving enough credit to the organization that enabled you to write comments that look this c o o l

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[i kan reed]

Well, there's a steaming pile of ignorance there.

1. Almost all serious websites are xhtml compliant. That's because being compliant is good for any bots crawling the site.
2. Do you imagine that all the HTML5 support that already exists came from nowhere? It was browser devs implementing the pre-reccomendations for HTML5 as a good idea. If the no one "gives a damn" about w3c, you'd find Chrome and Firefox behaving very differently with how they implemented next-gen UI elements.
3. Just use jquery or something, sheesh. No one needs to manually fiddle with DOM anymore.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[NotDrWho]

Turning de facto standards that have been implemented in actual browsers into a formal specification is how standards work best.

It's funny, back in the day all everyone did on /. was bitch and moan every time MS implemented anything in IE that wasn't W3C standard. Now that it's not THE EVIL MICROSOFT doing it, suddenly everyone is all "FUCK W3C!!!"

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[i kan reed]

I'm not sure slashdot counts as serious.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[UnknownSoldier]

> Just use jquery or something, sheesh. No one needs to manually fiddle with DOM anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not agains jQuery. It serves a useful purpose. HOWEVER, yeah, like I have better things to do then debug that unholy-mess called jQuery.

There is a time to manipulate DOM with small, simple, fast Javascript. And a time to use a more heavyweight solution.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Richard_at_work]

Lets not forget where XmlHttpRequest came from...

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[gstoddart]

Well, to put that into perspective ... Microsoft used to sit on standards boards, and before the standard was finalized they'd file submarine patents, and do their own implementation which was already not compliant and had proprietary extensions.

So, when Microsoft was doing it, it really was evil ... ha ha ha, thanks for telling us how to implement this, now we've patented it, and we're already extending it for our own purposes.

There were a bunch of years where Microsoft never found a standard they couldn't completely fsck up for their own interests.

Microsoft used to do it to shit on the standards process and give themselves something which didn't work with anything else -- because Microsoft didn't want standards to succeed. If it wasn't theirs, it needed to be destroyed.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[KingMotley]

Please show an example where Microsoft sat on a standards body and then patented something regarding that spec, because as much as you'd like to believe this is true, it simply isn't. You have this backwards. Microsoft often had patents relating to things they sat on a standards body for (much like everyone else on that committee), and in most cases had already implemented a version of it before the committee was formed, let alone ratified anything. In some cases, they implemented something that was being discussed prior to ratification (which takes years), and then the standards body changed their minds and made changes to the standard before ratifying it. And in other cases, Microsoft implemented functionality that was already prevalent in the marketplace (another companies work -- usually netscape), and the standards body came up with a different, incompatible solution to the same thing.

If you have an example (any example) of what you say, I'd like to hear it, because I've never found any evidence of it, yet.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[gsnedders]

On the other hand, the W3C Patent Policy makes it impossible for MS to do that --- they must either disclose their patents and notify the group that they are withholding them from the royalty-free grant within 180 days of certain points of the spec's development or they grant all members of the group an irrevocable RF grant (the intention of the policy is you give a list of all patents you have covering the spec and whether you're withholding them; in practice most people don't even look at patent portfolios because they know they'd just give an RF grant for any it covers and hence it's not worth the time looking).

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[wonkey_monkey]

{ box-sizing:border-box; width:21px; padding:5px; margin:5px; border:1px solid black; }

Doesn't include the margins (none of the options do), but your bordered box will be 21 pixels wide (inclusive of borders). box-sizing:padding-box; makes it 21 pixels excluding borders.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[ultranova]

Where the total width is what you say it is: 21px. Instead we have the stupidity that the actual width is 32px. and paddings, margins et al ADD to the defined width instead of being a part of the element. Which makes calculating dimensions in HTML a fucking pain in the ass.

What happens if the total width you declare is less than the combined width of paddings, margins and borders? Which seems likely, if addition is such a "pain in the ass" for you, especially when CSS inheritance rules come to play.

Also, as a user, I say this: the harder it's for HTML "programmers" to specify element sizes - especially in pixels - the harder it is for you to make a layout that breaks on any configuration you didn't expect (which would be almost all of them), which in turn makes things better for me.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Wraithlyn]

Sorry, but the steaming pile of ignorance is yours.

> 1. Almost all serious websites are xhtml compliant.

Um, bullshit? Want to try backing that up with something? A random sampling of cnn.com, google news, apple.com, Facebook, Youtube, and LinkedIn shows they all use HTML5 doctype. And here's a graph showing XHTML's continuous decline as it dies a well deserved death.

> 2. Do you imagine that all the HTML5 support that already exists came from nowhere? It was browser devs implementing the pre-reccomendations for HTML5

No, it was browser devs (WHATWG, as the GP correctly pointed out) ignoring the W3C's strict XHTML idiocy and opting for a saner route.

The WHATWG was formed in response to the slow development of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web standards and W3C's decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies.

- Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

We got HTML5 despite the W3C, not thanks to them.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Euler]

Paper standards are worthless 9 times out of 10; typically they are full of ambiguity or have stipulations that are grossly inefficient to implement. There is a necessary research phase to writing airtight, or even usable specs. I call this 'implementation.' So yes, de-facto specifications are the best. You could do the research phase and just throw away the resulting code and test results, but why do that? So the only use I have for a standards body is to perform quality-control on the existing documentation.

RFC's are a good model: you invent something - then just document it and let people file their complaints. But it is not open for general blue-sky speculation.

Java's demise

[Kokuyo]

One can only hope more appliance producers will ditch Java for HTML5 web interfaces... configuring SAN switches has become a freaking pain in the butt.

WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[rjmarvin]

The W3C was unclear about the embargo time for the news, and as a result the story has been pulled for the moment. It will be live again at 10am PST/1pm EST.

Re:WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[jeffb (2.718)]

If they're actually specifying the embargo time in Eastern or Pacific Standard Time, even though most of the US remains on Daylight Saving Time until Sunday Nov 2, the confusion may last a bit longer than they expect.

I love the way the link leads to a "sorry we can't find it, here are some suggestions..." page, with the first suggestion being the very same link, which produces the very same result. Okay, maybe I was looking for an error page.

It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard

[null etc.]

That was fast.

Not found.

[jafuser]

The article is 404'd and I'm not seeing any other news of this. Did someone jump the gun? The w3c page still says "proposed recommendation".

W3C's clout: they can keep DRM outside

[ciaran2014]

W3C still has an important role: they're the standards body.

We've been telling governments for years to use open standards and HTML is often held up as a shining example. A lot of governments have even made commitments to using open standards but if W3C announces that DRM is part of HTML, then governments will accept DRM and they'll think/claim they're doing what we asked with regard to open standards.

So we need to keep telling W3C that we don't want DRM in HTML. And when W3C says "Oh, but Netflix really wants DRM", we just reply that this doesn't require blessing from W3C.

FSF is almost the only organisation campaigning on this: https://www.defectivebydesign....

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[oever]

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

Answer: there is no schema. Validating documents seems to have gone out of fashion. Writing a parser for HTML5 is extremely difficult. Basically the broken parsing behavior of old browsers is now standardized in a crazy arcane description of how to parse HTML5 documents.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syn...

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules? The current browsers. This raises the bar for entry.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Actually the current browsers have a lot to lose with crazy parsing rules. Lots of edge cases, writing lots of nasty hacks to get around various markup bugs...

Even it does mean higher bar of entry, the bar's pretty high anyway because even if we did have schema parsing, the render piece really is the hard part.

Who does this benefit? Lazy crappy godawful web developers.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[DarkOx]

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules?

But so do end users who want to view existing pages and anyone with existing pages but perhaps not terribly well designed and implemented web pages / applications.

There is so much tag soup out there, its hard to image some new schema validating strict rendering browser being very useful out side of the leading ecom sites. The fact is lots of really valuable information is still sitting around on home pages at universities and elsewhere on personal blogs etc that is a mess of barely parse-able tags; yet todays browsers by and large to a fabulous job presenting those documents all things considered.

A new clean standard and an new clean reference browser to go with it might be great for buying airline tickets, and ordering widgets but we would give up so much.

Why do think there was such an effort to mirror geocities? There was a lot of interesting things there long forgotten by many and their original owners in amongst the chaff. Not sure we want to say goodby to that history.

Re: Updating

[AvitarX]

I think it also had to do with export restrictions, so they implemented encryption using activex before said restrictions were loosened.

Into the 90s (late even I think) useful encryption couldn't be exported much from the US.

Re:Video rental

[AikonMGB]

Let me fix that for you: why is movie rental supposed to work? Just because a business model made sense at one point for a particular medium does that mean that it will continue to do so moving forward, nor that artificial restrictions should be placed on innovation to force existing business models to soldier on.

Re:Not even remotely correct

[qpqp]

Kiddo, get off our lawn and RTFM. You ain't got a clue what the parent is talking about.