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Microsoft Suggests Carving Up HTML 5

Posted by timothy on Thu Apr 24, 2008 10:05 AM
from the slice-and-dice dept.
Microsoft The Internet IT
dp619 writes "HTML 5 is extensive and may take years to complete. Microsoft's solution to hasten its development is to carve it up. The company wants to divide HTML 5 into sub-specifications overseen by different working groups. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson said that HTML 5 features including its Canvas APIs, offline caching of Web applications' resources, persistent client-side data storage, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework would be useful outside of HTML. The WC3 seems to be receptive to the idea and says that a consensus is forming among working group members to do just that."
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Submission: Microsoft: Carve up HTML 5 by dp619 (893918)
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  • If Anyone Else... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WED Fan (911325) <akahige AT trashmail DOT net> on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:16AM (#23183422) Homepage Journal
    If anyone else were to suggest this approach, you'd all be saying, "Makes sense."

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tangent128 (1112197)
      True. Microsoft actually does have technical ideas worth considering. However, I wouldn't want to see Microsoft politically in charge of any of these efforts, given the influence of their marketing department.

    • If anyone else were to suggest this approach, you'd all be saying, "Makes sense."

      I disagree with this idea. This will just cause even more pain for web developers who will be forced to do incremental HTML 5 checking to see if a users browser supports "shiny new HTML 5 standard" or not. Then iterate that out across other browsers, who will probably implement things faster than the IE, given their history.

      Nope, bad idea. Release it when it's finished. Thank you.

    • If you ignore the fact that Microsoft is working on Silverlight, then sure, it makes some sense. In reality Microsoft is working on Silverlight and its motives are suspect.

    • Re:If Anyone Else... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nurgled (63197) on Thursday April 24 2008, @11:54AM (#23185462)

      I don't really care who's suggesting it; I've been thinking similar things myself. The amount of content in HTML5 is getting ridiculous. If none of it can be declared final until it's all done then there's going to be uncertainty surrounding it for a long time to come, and that'll either put off implementors or lead to the spec hanving to be backward-compatible with earlier drafts of itself and it'll be years before there's interop between browsers.

      • Re:If Anyone Else... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by hixie (116369) <ian@hixie.ch> on Thursday April 24 2008, @05:08PM (#23190512) Homepage
        Actually the spec has an annotation system where you can see how stable each section is, so we've somewhat side-stepped the issue of the whole thing not being done being a blocker for smaller parts.

        In practice, implementors (including Microsoft!) are happily implementing HTML5 already.

        Making the one spec be a bazillion smaller specs wouldn't stop us from having to make sure that each bit is compatible with implementations of that bit. Also, a smaller spec doesn't necessarily go much faster through the system than a big spec. Just look at XMLHttpRequest, which used to be part of HTML5 -- it's been split off for years, but it's still far from being a REC, and that's for a spec that's actually just describing existing browsers! This isn't anyone's fault, it's just that specs take a long time to get right. Anne's doing a great job on that spec, and I'm really glad he took it out of HTML5.

        Hopefully other editors will come up and volunteer to take other things out of HTML5. Several people have tried; we have a very poor success rate for these specs. Generally, things that get taken out just languish and die a slow death until I fold them back into HTML5.
    • I don't see how this is an argument. If a convicted serial murder known for his knife skills was to ask you to throw him a knife so he could slice an apple, wouldn't you _at least_ give it more careful thought?

      • I don't see how this is an argument. If a convicted serial murder known for his knife skills was to ask you to throw him a knife so he could slice an apple, wouldn't you _at least_ give it more careful thought?

        You're asking if I'd hand OJ a knife? Am I dating his ex?

        Uh, wait...too soon?

    • I think HTML5 is "doomed". I quoted doomed because it will happen, but it's a mess. The big problem is its name. I don't like mixing payload with transport. HTML can be delivered over a zillion different transports, hell even carrier pigeon. HTTP can be used to transport all kinds of bits and bytes. HTML5 is really Browser-Spec-5 which covers everything and the kitchen sink.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gutboy (587531)
        I've said this before but I'm going to say it again.

        Before anyone can work on a standard, their company must agree to donate any patents that become part of the standard to the standards org, and the standards org must allow any patents they own to be used for no charge. The original company can say "no" to the use of their patent in the standard. If any patented stuff 'accidently' gets placed into the standard, it is up to the company to notice and reject the use of their patented stuff. Failure to do so

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by peragrin (659227)
          Yet your missing the fine print. There are Patents on OOXML, The Patent license which MSFT lets others duplicate OOXML specifically doesn't allow licenses that redistribute the patented software.

          so you can't write an OOXML parser with the GPL, Apache, MPL, and several other licenses. Yet the ISO still allowed it to pass.

          Enjoy the fine print. MSFT owns souls because of it. MP3 decoders are the same way. MSFT isn't the only company to endorse a standard that can't be implemented by anyone because of pate

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jd (1658)
              Oh, c'mon, be real. If it's Microsoft we're talking about, then ISO isn't just a schill. They're a very very well-paid schill.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by trolltalk.com (1108067)

        Actually, it doesn't make sense. Under that scenario, you could have different sub-groups interpreting the specs in varying, contradictory ways, and end up with supposedly "conforming" implementations that break other sub-groups' work. We've already got too much of that in the browser world, and the chief villain has always been Microsoft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd (1658)
          You don't have to go that far. Microsoft simply picks one or two of its technologies that work well with one group of the things that needs defining, and makes sure that it defines that group according to how its technology works. Instant specification. Better yet, the specification can then be completely open as the only way to implement it "correctly" is via a technology Microsoft has patented, and since that's how all IE browsers will implement it, that is how those elements will be understood and used b

  • New TLA? (Score:4, Funny)

    by clang_jangle (975789) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:17AM (#23183462)
    The WC3...


    Damn that Water Closet Three!
    • Damn that Water Closet Three! For any Americans in the room, that's a toilet. Oddly enough, the abbreviation also seems to have worked its way into most European languages and cultures as well.

  • Standard Microsoft Tactics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by quanticle (843097) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:18AM (#23183468) Homepage

    This is pretty standard for Microsoft. I mean they've always only supported part of the specification. Now, I guess they're making this lack of full support explicit.

    In one way though, this is a good thing. If Microsoft says we'll only support sub-specifications A, B, and C, then web developers will have a better idea as to what restrictions they're working under to create cross platform sites. It'd be an improvement over the current system, which seems to consist of coding for one browser, and then going through and testing/experimenting with the other browser to see what's broken.

      • They're not out to screw us over.

        The recently-reconstituted IE team has done an excellent job of building towards standards-compliance. I've been extremely pleased that some parts of Microsoft seem to be softening up. I doubt that mentality represents a general shift in Microsoft's policies, but the browser team has accomplished some outstanding work.

        I think dividing the standard up into subsections is a good idea, as it helps keep the specifications small and understandable. Having all that stuffed into one big standard is just asking fo

  • Everything has to be modular [slashdot.org]?

  • RISKY but wise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gcnaddict (841664) <gcnaddict @ g m a il.com> on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:30AM (#23183712)
    There are a few risks. The biggest one is if any of the teams slip behind or run ahead of schedule. If that happens, pieces will begin to fall out of sync.

    however, the biggest benefit would be to web developers if this goes through as planned. I'd appreciate a properly modularized HTML5 myself.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by FiloEleven (602040)
      Only if they keep it split up for further development. From what I understand, HTML 5 is a huge overhaul that adds tons of new functionality. This takes a big initial effort. I would guess that once all the pieces are in place, improvements and changes will be small enough that a concurrent rollout of each module will be quite feasible and avert the scenario you suggest.

  • If it were anyone but Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jollyreaper (513215) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:33AM (#23183766)

    If anyone else were to suggest this approach, you'd all be saying, "Makes sense."
    If it were anyone else but Microsoft, we might be willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

  • Kitchen Sink (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chelloveck (14643) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:46AM (#23184050) Homepage

    On the one hand, I want to say that this sounds reasonable, despite it being suggested by Microsoft.

    On the other hand I want to say... WTF?!? Why does a markup language need all that crap anyway? Persistent local storage? What does that have to do with page markup?

    I'm not saying that these other things are bad or unnecessary. Just that they shouldn't be part of the HTML spec. Just like CSS and JavaScript are both widely used with HTML, but are defined in their own separate complementary specs.

    I suppose the real reason for the kitchen sink approach is pragmatic. As explained in TFA, no one has volunteered to take over individual parts. But if nobody cares enough to commit to that, maybe nobody really cares about the result either and those other parts are unnecessary? I say keep HTML as a markup language, add hooks for other things, and let those other things be specified if and when someone actually cares enough to do it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mabhatter654 (561290)
      The browser makers and web designers really pushed for WHATAG standards and were about to push HTML5 over top of the W3C. It's a standard made of what people that WRITE web pages and people that WRITE web browsers want to see changed/fixed versus the last 8 years that nothing much has changed. Web designers need to have ALL the parts there, and browser makers need everybody to develop at the same time so people USE the specs.

      I'd like to see a rollout schedule more than anything else. Release each module

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hixie (116369)
        I'd love to be able to make the Web browser developers not implement anything but what the spec says. However, they don't obey us. :-)

        Better to have a spec for them to follow than to say "no, implement the rest first!" and have them make up their own thing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hixie (116369)
      Until I started working on HTML5, there was no spec that defined "window" (as in, window.location, window.document, etc), there was no spec that defined XMLHttpRequest, there was no spec that defined the details of how to talk between iframes, etc. Does this mean nobody cares about those either?

  • And I suggest... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...carving up Microsoft!

    You all know it makes sense.

  • Business plan (Score:3, Informative)

    by WK2 (1072560) on Thursday April 24 2008, @11:27AM (#23184892) Homepage
    1) complain about how slow HTML 5 is coming along
    2) implement HTML 5 early; broken and unfinished
    3) web developers use IE HTML 5
    4) even after HTML 5 comes out, most web developers are confused as to the difference between HTML 5 and IE HTML 5
    5) non IE web browsers have a tough time implementing HTML 5, and trying to render broken web pages
    6) ????
    7) Profit!!!

    Also, what does Warcraft III have to do with anything?

  • I'm the editor of the spec and I agree... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hixie (116369) <ian@hixie.ch> on Thursday April 24 2008, @04:44PM (#23190062) Homepage
    I'm the editor of HTML5, and I agree entirely with Microsoft here (and they're far from the only people saying this). The problem is that we have very few competent specification editors, and if we did have some, there are literally dozens of specifications that are really important to the Web that need editors. Splitting the spec wouldn't make the Web platform grow any faster, it would just mean big parts of the spec would languish even longer.

  • CSS3 got cut up into modules, and there was a long period of bickering about them, and CSS3 still isn't here.

    Putting the product manager of the least compliant browser in charge of the next generation of HTML is like appointing a career street criminal as Attorney General.

    I have no trouble believing that HTML5 is being delayed so that MS has enough time to implement it correctly.

    (XHTML2 > HTML5)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by snoyberg (787126)
      As much as we all hate Microsoft, I think this is genuinely a good idea. Can't we put aside our biases and consider this proposal on its own merits?

      • Re:Embrace, Extend! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tbannist (230135) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:29AM (#23183672)
        Well we should carefully consider whether it's a trap or not. I mean Microsoft isn't always wrong, but they have a strong track record of evil. It bears examining their proposal closely to see if you can spot the evil machinations.

      • Re:Embrace, Extend! (Score:4, Funny)

        by FooAtWFU (699187) on Thursday April 24 2008, @10:39AM (#23183870) Homepage
        Yeah. Microsoft can be okay. Even a stopped clock is right once a day!

        <.<

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by mrmagos (783752)
          Strange, all my broken clocks are correct twice a day. Do you do out of your way to purchase 24-hour clocks and break them? I thought my hobbies were weird....

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ifni (545998)
            Mine are right FOUR times a day, thanks to the Time Cube [timecube.com].
            • A broken ship's clock could be right six times a day for the right kind of breakage. Well, except in the Royal Navy for the second dogs watch. So only 5.5 times a day for them.

              A broken regular chiming clock could be right 24 times a day.
            • By the Time Cube logic (four simultaneous days, one in each of four time zones), a stopped clock is right 24 times a day.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Metasquares (555685)
        I agree. Hearing all of the things that they want to put in it now, I'm not really sure that a lot of them belong in HTML anyway. It seems like we're trying to stuff everything that was hot over the last 10 years into a language that was meant to be used purely for website markup.

    • what comes after that again?
      Profit!
    • >> Embrace, Extend!
      >> what comes after that again?

      4. Profit?

    • Software date rape?

    • Well, at least now they're being more explicit about their lack of full compliance. Now, when Microsoft says that they "support" a standard, web developers have no idea how much support they're getting. With this, there'll be finer granularity, so Microsoft can say, "We only support subspecifications X, Y, and Z; everything else may not work." This'll make it easier for web developers to see what features they can use while maintaining compatibility with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

    • I understand they're working on an ISO-OOXML compliant office suite.
    • While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I have to say that doing things (especially large projects) in a modular fashion does make sense.

      Seen from a different view, USB 2 and USB 1 standards are not incompatible, and worked well. There are devices that are not USB2 compliant, but work with systems that are.

      In terms like that, if MS wants to tell the world that they will only be compliant with USB1, let them. While the rest of the world works and becomes compliant with version 2. The real problems wou

    • Re:HTML5 needs a lot more work (Score:4, Informative)

      by Excors (807434) on Thursday April 24 2008, @12:30PM (#23186100)

      Last I checked, HTML 5's working doc says that forms aren't going to change over html4.

      They are going to change. It's not yet decided exactly how they will change – the HTML WG has Web Forms 2 [whatwg.org] (an extension of HTML4's forms), and the Forms WG is working on some rough ideas for trying to fit XForms into HTML5, and there is a joint Task Force that is meant to be working things out between the groups but hasn't actually managed to achieve anything yet. (None of the major browser developers has indicated much interest in implementing XForms, whereas Opera has already released an implementation of WF2 and there is some ongoing work to implement parts in Firefox and Safari, so the momentum is currently in that direction.)

      allow forms to validate without having to have [div]s that do nothing but hold hidden fields because [input] is a presentation tag and therefore must be within a text-carrying tag

      Web Forms 2 says "input elements of type hidden may be placed anywhere (both in inline contexts and block contexts)", which sounds like it satisfies your concern (and has the advantage of working in all existing web browsers, unlike a new <state> element).

      can we PLEASE have them back so that we can use them for tabular data (like item names, prices, descriptions, etc)?

      <table> has never been deprecated, and HTML5 still permits it. (Tables used for layout are not allowed, although that's impossible for an automatic validator to detect). There are already CSS properties that can replace cellpadding ('padding') and cellspacing ('border-spacing').

      would it really kill the documentation writers to say what something has been deprecated BY?

      It seems spec writers usually think that kind of thing should be described in tutorials or other documents, not in the specification. The HTML5 spec is far harder to read than HTML4 (because it's far more detailed, to fix the differences between implementations caused by HTML4's vagueness), so it really needs that kind of user-oriented documentation. The differences document [w3.org] gives a brief mention of what should be used instead of some obsolete features, but it would be nice to have more detail and examples for people who want to move to HTML5.

      • I didn't even think HTML had versions. When did HTML 2 even come out?!


        November 1995

        HTML 3.0 was proposed in April of 1995, but it was too complicated and nobody supported it. A simplified version, HTML 3.2, came out in January of 1997. These days, almost everyone is using HTML 4.0, which came out in December of 1997, or 4.01, which came out in December of 1999.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by hixie (116369)
        HTML5 doesn't actually have the problem of some parts being "delayed" because of other parts being immature -- the spec has annotations all the way down showing how stable each section is, and browsers (including Microsoft!) are implementing it. The HTML5 spec has been progressing much faster, with much more input being taken into account, than other specs at the W3C. In fact, splitting the spec would likely make things go significantly slower, since it would mean that there would be much more cross-group a

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