Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
De-crocking HTML5
<p>Stephen Celis has a fun post talking about Douglas Crockfords HTML 5 comment, namely:
…the HTML5 project is misguided… It is trying to do too much without a clear mission that defines the problems it is solving. I think the project needs a reset.
He comes back:
Where’s the glitz, though? The dazzle? What can an artist do without a canvas? We could have audio and video, and no plugin! You won’t miss my congratulatory advertisement this time. You deserve to know. And to know the joy of SQL, finally, in the browser. Forms with placeholders and validations built-in! Vectors! details! And the semantics, oh the semantics! What’s a poor old Google to do, parsing through divs and spans when it could have nav, article, and aside? Won’t somebody please think of the robots?
But let’s leave the HTML argument be, for now. We can at least agree that CSS is in a wonderful place. JSON’s little half nephew is doing all right.
And then he finishes up with the fun demo that is embedded in the video above too, else point Safari 4 or Chrome.latest.devchannel to his post.
Related Content:
I agree with Douglas Crockford here and I have written about this before.
Strange, that he do not join the force and instead starts a one-person project?
A couple fo days back I had the strange idea (because of the many <div> in current html:
Would there be any use of _anonymous html tags_* such as: <>Text</> and how could I adress it in css?
How about: < class=”foo”>Text</> could be addressed with .foo normally.
*there are anonymous functions in many other languages.
Crockford have done some pretty amazing things [JSON, JSLint, +++], and he have said some pretty weird things…
.
I am pretty sure that this is at least 50% in the second category…
.
Together with his args about Microsoft’s implementation of x-site XHR previously…
The placeholder image for this video is terrifying.
This is a pretty good example of CSS transitions at work, the source code is helpfully formatted for reading. While currently a Safari-only feature (not unlike IE’s ActiveX-based transform/transition filters from back in the day), it could be useful and it might be interesting to see some standard adoption in this area if the technique becomes popular with developers.
I’m not sure what to think of having animation properties defined in CSS, though it does seem convenient and logical when simply adding a transition or animation effect between a link’s normal and hover states, for example.
CSS transitions and animations work well on the iPhone, where it’s painfully slow to move things with the DOM in JavaScript. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why they are in Safari.