Hard Truths About HTML5

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner discusses a number of hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 — especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating native apps. 'The truth is, despite its powerful capabilities, HTML5 isn't the solution for every problem. Its additional features are compelling and will help make Web apps formidable competitors for native apps, but security issues, limitations of local data storage, synchronization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'"

so what - it doesn't do innovation for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like its just not being utilized properly... I'm a software engineer and I make (web-based) frameworks/tools/languages do things they were never supposed to... Its called innovation...

Can you make a javascript alert box from PHP?

echo "document.write("alert('hey');\");"; //Something like that would do it.

HTML numbering scheme

[dokc]

I'm going to wait for HTML 6.

You didn't hear? Numbering is "out".
It will be just HTML in the future and the version numbers will be hidden from average users.

Re:On no. 1 & 3: Never trust the client

[moberry]

I try to work my web-apps in the MVC style -- or at least the "VC" style. The browser is the view, the only thing it gets sent is data to display. It is fairly simple to through a debugger up and see exactly how the server API works, but it's also fairly simple to ensure your API is only servicing valid requests and all data is being validdated/escaped/etc.

Re:Holding off using it for other reasons

[jalefkowit]

XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers.

I'm a web developer who was also a member of the W3C's HTML Working Group [w3.org] (the group where the HTML5 spec was hammered out) during the development of HTML5, and I can tell you that if you believe that HTML5 was written for web developers, you are wrong. HTML5 was written by and for browser vendors -- Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and (somewhat) Microsoft. The opinions of other Web stakeholders were of minimal concern. Concerns about the spec raised in the WG by anyone who wasn't a browser implementer were routinely shouted down with threats to withdraw from the W3C process completely by those who were. Some who advanced concerns, like accessibility professionals, were actually derided in quite personal terms by representatives of the browser vendors, both in official WG communications and in their own private back channels (like IRC), which invariably leaked. (Here's a good writeup [cnet.com] of some of the friction that existed in the WG between browser vendors and everybody else.)

There are a lot of things in HTML5 that I'm looking forward to being able to use, but if you're a web developer you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking that HTML5 was written for you. It wasn't. Almost every decision made in the development of HTML5 was made to make Google's life easier, not yours.