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 poorly at times, take over the browser and sometimes crash it. Behaviour is becomming terrible, but as pages are done by authors who do not really care, so long as it looks like it should and does the basics, they care not what a wreck have created.
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object.
"Hi, we assume you have the latest browser and all the plugins!"
How will this effect IE7 (Score:2, Insightful)
And meanwhile in IE Land... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How will this effect IE7 (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
A bit premature? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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)
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: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
Horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
that's exactly why they should be in the standard creation team.
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:Talk about spin! (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 what that means ;-o
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.
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: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++.
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:Please, give us better layout tools (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. If it is functionally equivalent to TABLE, then it's redundant markup (like the old MENU and DIR list types, which were in practice equivalent to UL). It'll also have exactly the same shortcomings that table-based layouts have (particularly: mixing presentation in your structure, and limits on scalability, particularly going down to small devices like phones). The only thing that will distinguish it from TABLE is that parsers will know not to interpret it as tabular data. You may as well add a "NOTDATA" attribute to TABLE.
The only designers it will benefit are those who follow the "don't use tables" mantra as received wisdom, rather than understanding the reasons behind it. It's just like people who try to use CSS to imitate a table layout in order to present actual tables, because they've heard "tables are bad, use CSS instead" instead of "tables as layout lead to a number of problems with can be avoided by using CSS instead"
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:2, Insightful)
Incidentally, we call teaching someone a foreign language by using nothing but that language "immersion". While it's certainly not the most gentle method in terms of initial learning curve, it has been demonstrated time and again to be among the best methods. It works on adults to. If you move to a country without knowing the language, the desire to stay alive (and eat!) tends to be a very strong motivator for accelerating the learning process.
(Compiling the source of a compiler with the compiler itself is a mark of maturity. Writing a specification in itself doesn't seem in any way outlandish.)
Re:The More they add, the less I like (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh... (Score:2, Insightful)
we've been forced to deal with for 15+ years now... and holds back adoption of XML formats
that are much easier to process and much more amenable to creating a Semantic Web.
Retire HTML and let's get XHTML2 out the door and get browser support for it... that's what
the Web needs.
WRONG!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to see JUST browser makers and web designers in on the next specs. I under stand TBL (father of the web) doesn't like the idea of "web apps" over semantic documents, but the case is lost. The biggest thing is that the W3C doesn't actually make a fully useful browser of their own... they should defer to those that DO make browsers and those who design web pages and create a spec that's 100% useful and implemented rather than "pie in the sky".
Re:Please, give us better layout tools (Score:2, Insightful)
Government websites have to be fully accessible according to a government standard (508, I think), but non-government websites certainly don't. And making the argument that the visually impared/those with motor control difficulties make up such a small percentage of the population is not only superfluous, as even ten percent of the total internet population is well over 100,000, and the number of people with alternative access needs will only continue to rise as access proliferates, but outright discriminatory. If the guilding principle of the web is information and communication for all, exclusion isn't an option.
(I realize I'm not using exact statistics here, but I unfortunately don't have time to look them up right now.)
For the webapp we're doing, our team is adhering to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/). This set of guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are perhaps more important than entanglements over HTML5 and such right now, as they're concerned not only with implementation (how a page is programmed), but how it is designed, from the ground up, to be accessable to all. Implementation should flow from this, IMHO.
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.
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 generic 'portal' that simply displays whatever the web developer wants to toss up on it for the user to look at; frankly it's very television-like.
However, there is a completely different conception of the internet where the pages should be marked up as generally as possible, and the user's browser should then choose how to display the information in a way that's meaningful to the user. It would probably mean that "your Internet" wouldn't look anything like "my Internet," but there's no inherent reason why that's bad. We've grown to treat it as if it is, but that's only because we want the web experience to be like flipping channels on a TV, where your Discovery Channel looks exactly like mine.
Re:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not to put words in his mouth... (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.
Take a look at your own page. You provide an unstyled list of links at the top. When I put my mouse over the first one and move it down over the list, it's not obvious exactly which one I am over when I am anywhere near the edges. I have to look at the status bar if I want to be sure.
This is not about funky layouts or designs that scew things up. This is about a totally normal situation — adjacent links — being slightly improved by the appropriate use of visual feedback.
I think this is great (Score:2, Insightful)
And so forth. Certain other things that other people have called for, I'm more agnostic about, like built in support for drop shadows and rounded corners, but there'll be no love lost on my part when they finally replace the current standards.
Re:The More they add, the less I like (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:Today is NOT a good day to die. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The More they add, the less I like (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 contortions you have to go through to make a basic 3-column layout with one liquid column. And that's a pretty damn trivial layout. Anything more complicated than that and you're in for a world of pain.
Small wonder then, that everyone seems to have standardized on 2- and 3-column presentation. It's pretty much the most you can do without a Ph.D. in web voodoo. But let's not pretend that this is a holy advance in the world of design. It's the opposite - a set of handcuffs for the designer, for the sake of getting one useful feature (namely, separation of content and design).
To be fair, I am referring to CSS as it has been implemented, not as it has been designed. There are a ton of fabulous CSS features that address all my complaints. It's just that none of them work out there in the real world.
Re:I think this is great (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
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 buzzword-tastic, M$ could not then release a "WML Support Upgrade" for IE7 unless the w3c said so.
too bloody simple, obviously