W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5 310
Lachlan Hunt writes "Today W3C announced that the HTML Working Group has published the first public working draft of HTML 5 — A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. It's been over 9 months since the working group began in March 2007 and this long awaited milestone has finally been achieved. '"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web..." Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively.' An updated draft of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 has also been published to help guide you through the changes."
Re:Not again (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't be the only one who thinks the W3C is annoying as hell...
The treadmill.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Large for-profit software giants must constantly make product to stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit...even if there's nothing REALLY to fix. Just make upgrades...sell new versions.
Consumers and businesses are constantly put on an upgrade-treadmill as older products are purposely torpedoed...even when they worked fine and did the job they needed to do.
now replace "for-profit software giants" with "design-by-committee standards organization" and "stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit" with "stay in charge and not have to get real jobs".
Read the diff (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not again (Score:1, Insightful)
HTML 5 will make it so we don't have to do crazy shit to tease the functionality we want out of a standard that wasn't meant to do what we have come to expect from websites.
Still sloppy (Score:5, Insightful)
So we have
At the start of every HTML document served with an text/html mime type? That's real rational. Let's get this tidied up once and for all and start html documents with
Is that such a difficult concept?
TWW
Someone hire this guy! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Implementations that use ECMAScript to implement the APIs defined in this specification must implement them in a manner consistent with the ECMAScript Bindings for DOM Specifications specification, as this specification uses that specification's terminology. [EBFD]"
Their language indicates that ECMAScript isn't a requirement. Essentially, "if you use it, you must implement it in a certain way". They don't mention requirements for implementations that don't use ECMAScript.
Includes? (Score:3, Insightful)
But - why has there never been an include mechanism in HTML?
Re:The treadmill.... (Score:4, Insightful)
no default ogg, sadly... (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
On top of that, we get decent application controls such as grids, trees, better lists, and meters.
Though audio and video I can live without. I'll be the first to get rid of it in my user CSS.
Oh, and I hope they know what they're doing by removing CENTER. Currently, there's no way to replicate its behaviour from CSS (CSS2). (And no, text-align: center ain't the same.)
Re:No more "td align" (Score:2, Insightful)
Still no value on select tags? (Score:4, Insightful)
'as an alternative to flagging an option tag with selected="selected", a select tag may have a 'value' attribute. A renderer should select the first child option with a matching value attribute.'
Please, my servers are getting fed up with rendering an entire country list just to flag one with selected="selected".
Re:Of course, it won't matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which sounds rather self-defeating to me; why would a group or company put in a lot of effort implementing the most difficult parts of the recommendation, if W3C explicitely reserves the right to change the spec under them any time before you're done?
Re:No more "td align" (Score:2, Insightful)
<style type="text/css">
table.align_left td{
text-align:left;
}
</style>
<table class="align_left">
<tr>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
</tr>
</table>
HTML5 is the wrong path (Score:5, Insightful)
To (hopefully) anyone who understands and advocates XHTML and CSS, HTML5 is a tragic mistake. I can't believe TBL is supporting this garbage. It brings back some (but not all: <i> and <b>, but not <u>) presentational tags and gives them worthless definitions. It's full of concessions to lazy/unskilled developers. It makes XML compliance optional. It's full of niche tags which are so narrowly focused (aside, dialog) that they're almost certainly doomed to lousy browser support. It doesn't address the current inadequacies of forms. It has tons of design flaws and inconsistencies.
Until there are consequences for not following the standards, it doesn't matter what the W3C does: People will continue to make pages and sites that are "just good enough", and browsers will continue to render what they want how they want. In the past, now, and for the foreseeable future, there's no incentive for anyone to do things right other than ego.
I don't get it. The people designing this stuff are supposed to be experts in the field, yet they seem hell bent on force feeding everyone this drivel. If their true goal is the hurl the web into chaos, then they will certainly succeed.
Uploading Files (Score:2, Insightful)
Fix : text, sizing, rendering (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey working group! Use CSS to pick a font. Give a method to get the various metrics of a layed out string and one to draw it. That will cover most uses.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also work to make validators for HTML5 that are far more detailed and friendly than the HTML4 validators ever have been.
But to be honest, this hasn't been the main focus of HTML5. We've been concentrating more on making the behaviour well defined for browsers, and on adding new features for authors to relax the need for proprietary technologies like Flash.
Re:HTML5 is the wrong path (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I understand, HTML 5 specifies exactly how a user agent should deal with formally incorrect code. I have never understood some people's obsession with XHTML, where a compliant browser is supposed to display an error message. With Opera, I encounter "XHTML" pages every now and then that do not display at all because they were dynamically generated from a database and there is a single illegal character in there or a forgotten close tag in a string coming from a database. How is that supposed to help anyone that every scripted page needs to be tested against every possible input condition? It could have been made optional in the user-agent to display a warning for web developers, but no, the spec requires that the browser justs bails out.
And xhtml also sucks for hand-coded pages since it is full of redundant closing tags, for things like <br>, <tr>, <td>, <li, and so on. It's only more typing and more obfuscating syntactic sugar. There are millions of people who create web content, and only a handful browsers. To me it is obvious that it is a waste of manpower to require of millions of people to learn the exact strict xhtml rules rather than make the browsers more flexible with non-conformant input, in a well-defined cross-browser portable manner. HTML 5 will add new useful features. XHTML adds nothing that wasn't already possible in HTML 4.01-strict (the version without font/frameset/bgcolor/etc. stuff).
I think you are talking about spacer GIFs and table markup. As far as I know, you can still abuse tables for page layout in XHTML. Moreover, to make a page that is really portable between 1024 pixel monitors and devices with a 150 pixel-wide screen requires much more than just xhtml/css; both the CSS and the page structure need to be carefully designed to be portable, in a way that is not enforced by the xhtml spec.
Re:Of course, it won't matter. (Score:2, Insightful)
But yeah, like with software development, you have to fix bugs when you find them, and you rarely find the bugs before actually trying to use the software (or in this case, the spec).
Re:Of course, it won't matter. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still sloppy (Score:2, Insightful)
Validation should be against the latest version, otherwise you'll be telling authors not to use new features (which is dumb) and not telling them about the mistakes that earlier versions didn't know about (which is also dumb). Thus validators also don't need a version switch.