How To Use HTML5 Today 155
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dori Smith offers developers a hands-on guide to using HTML5 today. 'Many of the media reports about HTML5 have focused on the politics, the "not until 2022" sound bite, or on HTML5's prospects as a "Flash killer." The reality of HTML5 is simply that it's the long-needed and long-overdue update to HTML4 — and you can start to implement it today,' Smith writes. Video, semantic tags, smart form input validation — Smith steps through several HTML5 features that can already be implemented, while noting several other presentation features that will soon be on their way. Smith also discusses IE work-arounds, such as HTML 5 Shiv and Google Chrome Frame."
Is HTML 5 still structured as XML? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is HTML 5 still structured like XHTML? I hope that it is, because one of the biggest pains in the HTML standard was the inconsistent syntax. I think a strength of strict XHTML was that it could be easily parsed by an XML parser, and if we are going back to the syntax of HTML 4 I think that's a step backwards.
Re:Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Minor improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
(Read the "print" version [infoworld.com] of the article, instead of the "tiny blocks of text spread over many pages of ads" version.)
I have misgivings about HTML5. It gives the page more control, and the user less. That's been a trend in HTML for years, and it's getting worse.
I'm dreading "canvas". Ad blockers need to get smarter. Noticed that popups are winning over Firefox's popup blocking? We're also going to see pages that use 100% of the CPU just for display. We're going to need a browser option for "don't run canvas code for windows that aren't on top.
The "input type" [w3.org] mechanism for forms is lame. There are a number of standard types like "tel", but it's just text with no line breaks. They should have provided for either regular expressions or syntax like the COBOL Picture clause ("CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER PIC 9999-9999-9999-9999").
Dynamically-loaded fonts have been working for some time now in all the mainstream browsers. (IE6 and Firefox 3.5 were the last mainstream browsers not to have it.) We've been playing with that for our steampunk site [aetherltd.com]. Downloadable fonts without anti-aliasing turn out to look ugly for small font sizes, because most of the display-type fonts have too much detail and not enough hinting for small font sizes. (In an annoying piece of Apple incompatibility, the iPad requires fonts in SVG, of all things. Everybody else, including Microsoft, is going to Web Open Font Format.) I'd recommend against using this feature much unless you have a good sense of typography. (Bad example: our steampunk search engine. [sitetruth.com])
Re:Is HTML 5 still structured as XML? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, No. HTML5 was designed by the guys that thought that XML was to hard, So they wrote a 5000 page spec that codified all the ways that browsers tried to handle broken syntax and made that the standard...
You think I am joking. I am not.
My hat of html05 know no limit. (ok, so thats a joke, but few here will get it.)