Apple, Opera, and Mozilla Push For HTML5 384
foo fighter writes "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years: HTML was last updated in 1999, XHTML was last updated in 2002, and no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML. Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items while being updated to reflect the current practices of web and browser developers and remaining compatible with legacy Recommendations. The much more open and transparent WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), formed in 2004 to address this problem, and has been hard at work on developing a draft spec for HTML5 to update and replace legacy versions of both HTML and XHTML. The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development."
The More they add, the less I like (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, I'm a curmudgeon. There, happy?
I still design pages using HTML 3.2 standard. Life was happy when pages were small and simple. I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript. Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them.
We rail away at Microsoft and anyone else who adds bloat to software, but the web is now plagued by page bloat and overly clever designs which render poo
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm with you brother, although I use HTML 4 and CSS 2. I wish people would take the time to code their pages so they are fast loading and elegant (code-wise), and HTML generation apps would do likewise. Additionally, I wish people would use proper caching as well -- this really speeds a site up too.
I haven't done much with style sheets, finding them to be just one more thing to manage, as they can get rather large the more I relied upon them.
Effectively when we write the HTML code by hand we're creatin
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, that's how I feel about people who don't use CSS. Seriously, if you are that concerned with the size of pages and bandwidth, like you say in your other comment, then why are you transmitting your style information on every single page load?
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed.
To the GP: I recently redesigned my main website [thelostworlds.net] after running it for five years with a design very much like the one you describe - all coded by hand, HTML 3.2, no CSS (although I had some equally old Javascript for highlighting the navigation buttons).
The new version uses CSS, and since I designed it using the "strict" mode of newfangled HTML, it renders more or less identically on different browsers. I also built a batch build content management system, so that I don't have to manually edit a bunch of HTML when I change the design or whatever. I made sure the output is basically what I would have done if I did it all by hand though.
I was very skeptical about it before I started, but it really is a much better way to build websites. It saves time, it makes redesigns and multi-platform stuff easier (like theoretically I could swap out CSS files to make a version formatted for PDAs if I were running a website that would be at all useful on them), and it's *much* easier to get relatively consistent rendering across platforms. The only visible difference I'm aware of between Firefox and IE6/7 is related to tables without a fixed width. Neither one looks superior, they're just different.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Effectively when we write the HTML code by hand we're creating very lightweight pages. I set some colours and a simple background based upon a small sample and I'm good. I came from the K-I-S-S school of web design, which seems to be dying mostly thanks to webapp/webpage development tools. It's like watching people program without a care about optimizing for size or speed. They're paid by the hour, not for the quality of the code.
Why do you set color and background? Let that be up to the user. Structured text with some hyperlinks, that is the way to go! Emphasize text with the em tag, use h1-h3 for headers, and the list tags... maybe the table tag for a simple table, or if extreme vital, a link to a SVG or PNG image (which should be obvious). That should be all you need. If you need personal, do a favicon, or maybe a link to a personal picture.
;)
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:4, Informative)
I'd settle for some taking away (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I agree that it's silly that they are required attributes, but merely missing the attributes off doesn't dump you into quirks mode. Quirks mode is determined by the doctype you use.
Re:I'd settle for some taking away (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Er, we do, and it's actually the default. Load a page without any styling information at all and see for yourself. If you want to specify a width, use { width: 75%; } or whatever relative width you like instead of using px, pt or whatever you are using now.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, this incessant pushing of the technology/standards envelope is creating a lot of disjoint, stilted, and otherwise unreadable web sites. It used to be web pages were mainly HTML with a few SSI thrown in for good measure; now they are over-burdened with flashy graphics, tricky menus (god how rollovers are getting out of hand!), and a lack of decent content. I mean, I go to a web site to find information I'm looking for. In the old days, you could do that -- now content is so snarled in meaningless fluff that have the time I have to search the source code just to find what I'm looking for.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The technology standards didn't create those websites, the developers did. You seem to be asking to halt technological advancement to save developers from themselves, when it should be the other way around...
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi there. I'm a web developer/designer. I do flash, too. Good times, right?
I design and build to the XHTML 1.0 transitional standard, and for some bizarre reason one of my clients still makes me test their pages in IE5. When was the last time you even saw a computer that had IE5 on it?
Your objections to design I can't really comment on beyond saying I hope you're not referring to any of mine. But your objection to HTML/CSS doing what javascript used to be necessary for? Really? You prefer writing little-stupid javascript functions to just putting a :hover rule in your CSS? Really?
You, sir, are a rare breed. Hats off to you though; HTML 3.2 is really the only standard the most browsers agree upon (IE6/7 have all those weird box model problems with XHTML 1.0).
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the impression he's not a professional web designer, so he can just ignore stuff like that entirely.
There's a very good reason for that. The W3C were working on HTML 3 when it became apparent that their work was diverging from what browsers understood; browser vendors were adding stuff at a crazy rate while ignoring the HTML 3 work. So the W3C decided to scrap HTML 3 and make a decent description of what browsers understood in HTML 3.2.
Basically, the reason why "most browsers agree upon HTML 3.2" is because HTML 3.2 was merely rubber-stamping what browsers already did.
There's no such thing as a "box model" in XHTML 1.0. The box model is a feature of CSS.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with everything else you said, but have to defer to the other guy on this one.
CSS allows you to play with the box properties (like borders and padding and margins), but the box model is the direct result of the div structure of XHTML 1.*. I know why you say otherwise. Conventionally, when we talk about the box model, we are talking about CSS's use of it, but technically, convention is wrong, in that the box is d
Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I've got a client that runs an e-commerce site. At least a couple hundred orders per day. I did a quick dig into today's stats. So far: 4 orders from people running IE5, and one from a Netscape 4 flavor. All appeared to be on dial-up connections. A little over $1600 worth of business in those 5 orders. These are orders for non-essential items, which suggests disposable income that COULD go into a computer upgrades, broad-band connections, etc. for those shoppers, but which have not. I absolutely guarantee that my client would rather have today's business from those 5 customers than have whatever liberty may come from being able to leverage current formatting fanciness/compatibility. Their site renders just fine in every browser to date, and that $1600 is in the bank, instead of that of a CSS-ed-to-the-hilt, hipper-than-thou competitor. Someday the numbers of legacy users will drop low enough to warrant the change, but $1600 before lunchtime says today's not the day.
Re:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:4, Informative)
He makes about 35% markup on orders like that. As of a more recent check (some hours since I chimed in on the thread), the ancient-browser-checkouts have now grossed about $2200. We'll call that, conservatively, about $500 of profit (not counting taxes, flushing the toilets, pizza for the warehouse guys, etc).
the site must look unappealingly 1997
No, I'd say it looks more early-2005. The design is deliberately lean, spartan, and surprisingly navigable considering they have around 12,000 items. The are leveraging Froogle, affiliate marketing with feeds and hot links into products... lots of the more recent goodies. There are some nested tables in play, still... but they come back with first-page Google hits on a great deal of what they talk about and sell.
Responsiveness is huge
Yes, it is. But any latency I've had to fight was almost always due to database performance problems, usually because some session management table or other beastie had outgrown the way the indexes were built, etc. Believe me... a complete redesign for new standards is desireable, and could indeed bring in some otherwise missed sales. But it's nice to not run off the little old ladies and their credit cards, too. 10 of them today, it looks like. That's about 300 of them per month, and they do a lot of repeat business... the business has about a 45% repeat customer rate. Which might not sound great until you realize they're growing rapidly. So, don't "meh" something that's working pretty solidly, and which is very much a topic of discussion and planning at the business. My point (back to the thread, here) is that the "web designer" to said "when was the last time you even say a machine running IE5" is full of crap. I'm not just seeing them, I'm seeing them show up and spend money.
Re:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, IE can handle box model perfectly. It's XHTML it can't handle at all. You must be sending your pages as HTML (text/html) and you've put XML prolog in your HTML, which triggers quirks mode (you may think it's XHTML, but browsers see it as HTML with lots of syntax errors and bogus DOCTYPE).
obligatory hixie reference [hixie.ch]
Re:Not to put words in his mouth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hover rules aren't useless eye candy. Hover rules are visual feedback letting you know you are over something clickable. If you move your cursor across a bunch of links, it's immediately obvious which one you are currently over without having to pay attention to precisely where your cursor is. Usability++.
Okay, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It used to be pretty standard for people to customize their browsers in order to change the text, link, followed-link, background, hightlight, and other colors; why does the page designer necessarily know better than the users themselves what the user wants?
We've moved a long way over the past few years towards making the browser into a generi
Re:Okay, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
With CSS, it can be both. The "C" in "CSS" stands for "Cascading". The style rules suggested by a web designer cascade together with style rules preferred by the user.
As for why it's a good idea for web designers to have this feature, well it's for the same reason any styling is useful for the web designer to have. Because although the user should have the final say (which CSS allows), it's difficult to predict exactly which presentation is most suitable for all the pages you are likely to encounter in the future. The web designer that produced the page, on the other hand, knows the context in which the information is being related and has a good chance of being able to come up with a more appropriate presentation than something that is generic to all pages.
Well if that's what you want, then pages being "marked up as generally as possible" is exactly the opposite of what you want. If you are relying on the browser to handle all presentation, then what you need is specific, accurate markup, not general stuff.
In any case, the two goals are not mutually exclusive, and CSS has been handling this for over a decade. For those users who like to be in control, they can configure their browsers to ignore author-supplied stylesheets. Everybody else can take what is suggested by the web designer, or configure their browser to make only minimal changes (e.g. font size).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you even read my comment? I'm talking about when you are moving through a list of links, like a navbar. Just because the links look like links and your mouse pointer indicates that you are over a link, it doesn't mean you are getting strong visual feedback about exactly which link you are over.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Interesting)
...
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That...can be arranged.
CHris Mattern
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really get your complaint. I mean, I share your annoyance with uselessly flashy pages, and literally Flash-y pages, but what's wrong with refining standards? Many of the updates to HTML have made things cleaner, more precise, and more consistent. Some of the added features have allowed web developers to do more with less code (if you can call HTML "code"). Much of what's added in-- if you don't want to use it, don't use it. But if you have some reason to do something flashy on your site, it's probably better to have it be done in some standard way rather than though some hack or by adding Flash to your page.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but that's not HTML 4.01 Transitional either. No version of HTML has permitted overlapping elements in the way that you describe. You are merely exploiting error handling that is fairly common amongst web browsers.
Re: (Score:2)
All of those errors are down to the fact that the validator doesn't understand HTML 5. Although it is quite interesting to note the chicken-and-the-egg problem of publishing the specification for a document format in the document format itself. You need to understand the format in order to read the document that explains how to understand the format.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:5, Funny)
Unless you're a Slashdot regular, of course.
Torben
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:4, Informative)
Well read the spec then. That's the HTML 5 doctype [whatwg.org]. The only reason they use a doctype at all is because otherwise it would trigger quirks mode.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, because MS FrontPage would never output broken HTML, would it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you haven't actually tried to do real layout with CSS. There's only a small number of basic layouts that actually work, and even those may require ridiculous hacks that exploit browser bugs to hide rules from certain browsers, and use image backgrounds to create the appearance of cells. Google for 3-column page layouts to see the con
How will this effect IE7 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How will this effect IE7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And meanwhile in IE Land... (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox plugin (Score:2)
Re:Firefox plugin (Score:4, Interesting)
Explaining the plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty soon, about as many people who have Flash will also have Firefox running inside IE, and it'll no longer be necessary for many people to cater to IE.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And meanwhile in IE Land... (Score:4, Informative)
A fundamental design principle of HTML5 is that HTML5 pages should work in existing browsers like IE6. You can write <input type="email">, and an HTML5 browser will allow useful auto-filling and immediate validation feedback, while old browsers will simply show a text box. New elements like <video> can have fallback content, e.g. to embed a Flash video player. New elements like <canvas> can be partially implemented by JavaScript in IE6. The HTML5 doctype (<!DOCTYPE HTML>) is chosen so that it triggers standards mode (as opposed to quirks mode) in all existing browsers.
So, you can write in HTML5 to provide added benefits for users of browsers that understand HTML5, while still being no worse than before for users of older browsers. And given that IE development has started up again, with IE7 making some progress on CSS standards compliance, and given that Microsoft is a member of the W3C's HTML working group which will almost certainly accept the current HTML5 work (as it was the reason for the working group to be formed, and nobody has raised any serious objections since it was proposed), I believe there is reason to be hopeful.
I started to (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I started to (Score:4, Funny)
5??? (Score:5, Funny)
Update CSS not XHTML/HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML is more or less fine, give me a better version of CSS anyday.
Re:Update CSS not XHTML/HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Update CSS not XHTML/HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
But, really, XHTML 1.1 is a great standard, and instead of moving ahead, let's try to get everyone to use it first. It hasn't been updated in forever (forever in web terms, of course) because the push has been to get everyone to actually use standards, and to get browser support of CSS2 and eventually CSS3 complete across all platforms and engines.
Just glancing over it, the HTML5 standards up at WHATWG worry me slightly. There seems to be a lot fo presentational/non-structural markup sneaking back in. Not necessarily as obvious as some of the older tags that were dropped in HTML4/XHTML1, but still. We have to keep in mind the separation of powers - XHTML/HTML for markup, CSS for presentation, and DOM for scripting - or things will just get way too complicated again.
Make things easier and more accessible for the developer/design? Sure. Add presentational content to HTML so he/she doesn't have to learn how to properly use CSS and the DOM? No. Do this, and it'll open the floodgates for everyone (MSFT) to add "special" tags to further "help" the developer/designers. Next think you know we'll be running around with a bunch of "Works best in
Re:Update CSS not XHTML/HTML (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Advanced selector support in CSS3 could also help with reducing the need for tons of classes and such. But that's also an implementation issue - Safari is pretty good, Mozilla and Opera are getting better, but even IE7 doesn't support all the CSS2 selectors, let alone the CSS3 ones.
For those not familiar, I'd encourage checking out the full list of selectors - especially the nth-child and attribute ones, which could make a huge
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The past new years I've noticed that the browser world has become IE versus "the rest". Firefox, Opera and Konqueror seem to render everything nearly identically. 95% of the rendering problems during website development seem to come
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What we REALLY need is updated versions of BROWSERS (especially IE--even v7 is out of date in terms of compliance). We don't need CSS4 or HTML5 or XHTML2...browsers still have a hard time with CSS2, HTML4.x/XHTML1.x!
do things like reference other elements attributes so that you can create tables and line up things across/down the page.
Does not CSS3--a current standard with which nobody yet complies--provide means for columnar layouts? Also, last time I checked the
This could be the leverage needed against MS (Score:3, Interesting)
We know Microsoft is capable but they just don't want to. Their weight and sloth is an abuse to the community at large.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This could be the leverage needed against MS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This could be the leverage needed against MS (Score:4, Funny)
It could be dangerous
Opera (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.opera.com/download/ [opera.com]
Talk about spin! (Score:5, Informative)
No, the W3C have been very busy [w3.org].
No, XHTML was last updated two months ago [w3.org].
Everybody is ignoring XHTML 2.0 because it isn't finished yet. XHTML 1.1 is not an option for most developers for one reason in particular: you can't use it with Internet Explorer. Blame Microsoft.
No, both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict are available for those people who wish to use a document type that doesn't include the deprecated stuff. And even if they weren't available, nobody needs deprecated items to be removed. If you don't want them, don't use them. Just because they appear in a specification it doesn't mean you are forced to use them.
No, they are requesting that the W3C — the organisation you've just written off as closed and useless — adopt their work as a starting point, so that it can be developed further at the W3C. They aren't asking that the W3C give it Recommendation status, they are asking the W3C to take over its development.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought it was because it was a pointless and unneeded reformulation of existing standards with no BC?
1.1 is not an option if you want to support UA's that only accept text/html and Lynx will never support application/xhtml+xml. All XHTML1.1 does is modularize version 1.0, most users probably don't even know w
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're welcome to that opinion, but I think the fact that it's a work-in-progress is the relevant factor to consider when wondering why people aren't using it. Even the W3C themselves don't want anybody to use it yet. In their own words, from the top of the latest specification [w3.org]: "It should in no way be considered stable, and should not be normatively referenced for any purposes whatsoever."
Re:Talk about spin! (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a relevant factor for the Safari developers to say [webkit.org] "the HTML standards process has been moribund; the W3C's HTML Working Group has focused almost exclusively on XHTML2, a new standard that was highly incompatible with existing practice" and "We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web". As far as I am aware, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft are all not planning to ever implement XHTML2, whereas they are already working on HTML5 – HTML5 also has many features that are work-in-progress and which nobody is using yet, but which the browser vendors are already implementing, because they are valuable changes and don't break compatibility with the current hundred billion documents on the web.
Misses the point (Score:5, Informative)
A bit premature? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why Developers Aren't Caring Too Much (Score:4, Interesting)
All this means to me as a developer is that I have another thing to keep track of in regards to my industry. Add it to the list which includes: Seeing if AJAX, RoR, and other Web 2.0 fads survive the next year; if PHP has even a glimmer of hope; PNG issues; content delivery to mobile devices; and of course assorted security issues.
We always have something new coming down the pipe, but that does not mean it is the next new thing. Many sing the praises of AJAX, but really it is far from perfect and likely to be replaced by something much better very soon. Nature of the biz I suppose, but I would not have it any other way !
Horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Please, give us better layout tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Tim Berners-Lee, bless him, didn't seem to understand that anyone would ever want a web page with more than one column. So some genius (a name I've forgotten) thought of using tables for layout, and many problems were solved: multi-column layouts with headers and footers which stretched to accomodate content and rendered the same way (more or less) across all browsers and platforms. Hooray!
Then came CSS: coding could be much cleaner and more flexible, but tables-for-layout was considered bad, and we began wrestling with creating layouts using divs and clears and floats, having to use such kludges as negative margins in order to replicate table-like behavior. It can be done, but it's harder. So for HTML5, how about setting aside creating new but not-very-helpful features like "overline" (who uses that?) and coming up with things that actually help us create web pages? Why not create a tag called "grid" that acts like a table, but is designed for page layout? Most graphic designers use grids, and it would really help web design as a whole if something like that existed for us.
How about a way of having content reflow from one column to another when a window is resized? Page layout programs have done this for 20+ years, so shouldn't it be possible for a web page and a browser today?
So please, HTML5 people, don't just talk to computer scientists and advocates for the disabled when creating this new specification. Think of the people who actually have to lay out pages!
Multi-column is already in the pipeline (Score:4, Informative)
The CSS3 multi-column module [css3.info] was designed for exactly that purpose. It's available in experimental form in current Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino, etc.), and according to that page, it's available in nightly builds of Webkit, which will eventually become a future version of Safari. (Since the spec isn't final, the rules use -moz and -webkit prefixes, so that if the spec changes they won't have to change the official rule's behavior.) No word from Opera, though there are reportedly a bunch of CSS3 features in store for the next major update, and of course, who knows how long before we'll see it in IE.
Remember: HTML for structure, CSS for layout.
Re:Multi-column is already in the pipeline (Score:4, Interesting)
The proper rendering of multi-column text is to embrace horizontal scrolling and forbid vertical scrolling. Column width and gutter need to be an even divisor of browser width and leave column height and count to flow to fit the window.
Of course, this is at right-angle odds with the design philosophy of web pages, so multi-column sections pretty much have to be subsections of the page itself as like an IFRAME, allowing the multi-column view without disrupting the rendering of the rest of the page.
As a result, it's a design mess and people go back to the single column view with sidebars for additional information, using web design to its strengths rather than forcing it to behave like other media.
If it must exist, it should be a style sheet rule-set so it can be applied according to output type such as hard copy where that presentation makes sense. I'd prefer to have image masks that enable text to flow around the curves of an image, and leveraging transparency for it would reduce the bandwidth impact.
Re:Please, give us better layout tools (Score:5, Informative)
What happens when your page gets displayed on a phone? With CSS you can simply revert to a single column (or the phone can just drop the CSS), with "grid", you need two pages, one for desktops, and one for phones.
I think XHTML is fine, it works and does the job. The only thing I would like is a client side include. Apart from that, I think CSS needs updating, not (X)HTML (or perhaps just browser support for CSS?).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. If it is functionally equivalent to TABLE, then it's redundant markup (like th
Forget HTML, it's CSS that's Broken, deal with it (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried, I really have, to embrace the Zen garden Juu-Juu of CSS, can you make a simple blog page work in CSS? sure! Can you make an massive website with many different templates and variable width data-areas work in CSS? Yea, if you're a complete lunatic. but you have to get there with hack over hack over hack over hack. Here is the deep dark secret of CSS, it's not designed for layout. It's fantastic for styling, but try doing a Box-model or Float layout and you quickly realizing you're asking CSS to do things it wasn't intended to do, and it simply does not break gracefully the way a simple table layout does (You know floats were originally intended for pictures, not layout areas). So while I respect the purity of a CSS for style, HTML for content concept, in practice CSS is just as much of a kludge as Table design. I've saved hours of time and reached wider audiences of compatibility by going for a hybrid design, but this breaks the "standards".
IMO, standards should follow simple elegant solutions, a hundred lines of CSS browser compatibility code and float hacks is far from an elegant solution. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give designers a proper layout language!!
Re:Forget HTML, it's CSS that's Broken, deal with (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried to make a simple 3 column table with CSS only. After struggling with that for an hour, I said fuck it, and put an old style table in there. It was much easier.
Re:Forget HTML, it's CSS that's Broken, deal with (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't really care what they do with HTML. As long as support for the old versions doesn't go away (and as long as you include the appropriate DOCTYPE there's no reason why it should), I'll always have the option of using the old version if I like it better, or using the new version if they make real improvements. I use the W3C validator, and a Firefox plugin to do the same (although the Mac version seems to be broken at the moment). HTML is great. I'm sure they'll make it better. Fine.
But CSS is a nightmare. I've got two books on CSS on my bookshelf; neither seems in any way comprehensive, and I don't think it's the fault of the book authors. My horribly broken stylesheets always pass validation anyway, because the syntax is fine, they just don't work the way I wanted. I'm not looking forward to building a new site a client wants me to make, partly because I know I'll have to build a new stylesheet for it. I love what CSS is capable of doing, I love the concept of using a stylesheet instead of splattering layout and style markup all over the HTML. But CSS, it its current form, is painful.
Validation... (Score:3, Insightful)
*yeah i know it's too late for that now but "HTML 5" could be called "WML : Web Markup Language" instead, whilst being new and b
Dear W3C, (Score:3, Funny)
What would it do? You have to ask!?
Yours,
the early 1990s
Why HTML5 rocks? (Score:3)
<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset=utf-8>
<h1>Hello world!</h1>
<p>This is a complete, valid HTML5 document
and it does work in current browsers as intended, even in IE6.
CSS is a failure, as is much of "Web Design" (Score:4, Interesting)
You place an element on a page. size it, etc. and you have NO contact with the code underneath, and frankly, you DON'T want to deal with it. It's messy and complicated.
Now, HTML was cooked up YEARS ago, and the closest we have to Pagemaker/Quark is Dreamweaver. Brilliant. And placing elements on a page is such a hack job between browsers that an entire industry of useless coders have sprung up to "take care of that" for us - CSS specialists who demand serious dollars to do something that shouldn't even be handled by humans. And WHY is this so?
1. Microsoft Their insistance on being non-public standard compliant and shoe-horning more crap into their browser and DOM for IE(x) has been a monstrous thorn in the side of web developers everywhere. At the same time, it is this incompatibility that gives CSS specialists and web designers/developers a job. Still, this is not a happy situation, and it is not going in a useful direction (HTML 5 will be gleefully ignored by Redmond, and the complexity of the resulting situation will only give more work to more CSS/AJAX specialists.
2. Fiefdoms The resulting incompatibilities that create the need for specialists actively works against finding automated solutions. If web design was reduced to the level of Adobe InDesign and web development was made as simple as visualBasic, then much of the "Web Industry" would disappear. Thousands would lose high paying jobs. I nreality, they (and this means YOU) are nothing but parasites subsisting on a faulty broken technology. Fix the technology and the cost of development would gradually collapse. Insisting that a web designer should know code would be seen as absurd as insisting that a type designer know how to read PostScript or raw TrueType instructions.
3. Flash et al. It seems much of the web started as one thing and ended up another.
Tables were built for tabular data, they soon became the structure by which a page was architected, as it put things in a specific place in page that was pretty much the same across browsers. And that is still the case. If I'm going "whip out" a page with a variety of elements arranged in the page, I'll use a table. It's faster and easier and it works. It's not as flexible or useful as CSS, but it works. With CSS, you spend huge amounts of time tweaking crap to appear across browsers. Still, Tables are old and not as flexible, and have been pressed into doing service they weren't designed for.
Same with CSS. It was developed to make things all purty-like. Now it's used for page layout and element placement - WAY beyond it's original mandate, which was taken from Desktop Publishing (stylesheets).
Flash was just a way to do spline based illustrations and animations on the web. When it was clear Flash could do much of the basics of what Director could do in a tiny fraction of the footprint, they began "directorfying" Flash, and shoehorned a Lingo into it, known as ActionScript. It is now a full blown frankensteinian disaster that is considered a "development platform", which is a cruel and misdirected hoax.
The examples are many and continuous. The "web" is a hack job. It is a slow moving train that has left the tracks (IE5 did that), and is slowly dying in its own complexity (of CSS, XHTML, AJAX, etc. hackery) as it rolls in excruciating slow motion off the cliff.
And now that the very livelihoods, mortgages, and private schools for the kids are DEPENDING on this complexity, the only logical conclusion is increased complexity, resulting in an ever higher range of exclusivity, casuistry, and sophistry. It will die, replaced by a lower context system, and when it does, a lot of people are going to get hurt. And, given the nature of the audience on /., it will mostly fall on their shoulders.
RS
Re: (Score:2)
IE7 is a lot better than IE6. Fact is if MSFT doesn't make the "standard" MSFT won't support it properly.
Re:microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
that's exactly why they should be in the standard creation team.
WRONG!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That's like asking the government for permission to go start a competing culture. you don't ask, you just go fucking do it, and if you do it right, the rest of the nation has no choice but to follow along.
Re:The Good News (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the reason Microsoft has had so much trouble with standards and the reason they will never be able to fully support standards as long as IE is integrated in Windows to the level it is. Standardizing would leave the OS itself high-and-dry, which is something Microsoft is not willing to do.
This was part of the reason Netscape sued them, and it was part of their anti-trust suit here in the US. Everyone knows this was done almost for the sole purpose of using MS controlled platforms (IE) to prevent non-MS controlled platforms (the web) from abstracting out all the functions a user needs. Most people still think the internet doesn't work on Linux, or that Linux has a "different internet" of its own. I would venture to say that their anti-competative practices with IE are the ONLY reason they still command the market share they do.
Talking to Microsoft before formalizing a web standard is like going to them for an open document format: you just end up knee deep in shit that Microsoft doesn't genuinely believe in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
How about HTML 2.0?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
CSS separates style from content (that's right there in the name, cascading style sheets), it doesn't address layout at all, which is why people using it for layout have to come up with horrible hacks with floats and the like. They're no better than tables, and I'm glad -moz-column-width is ugly and prefixed and not a standard, because it's too damn specialised. Reminds me of