Comments on: Proposal for the W3C to adopt HTML 5

By: Marcus Uy

Marcus Uy — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:24:15 +0000

All standards ultimately require you the designers, developers and programmers to support it. If you don’t want to support the proposed HTML5 spec, then don’t use it. Stick with XML-based specifications. Nobody is going to suddenly un-spec XHTML 1/2.

Frankly, it will be the browser developers that need to figure out how they are going to support all these different formats. Good luck and my sympathy to you folks (please make FF and IE work the same, without unexpected behaviours…).

All i ask is that the browser developers (all of them!) implement all these different specs to completion (dudes, I mean really finished, I can’t accept that, day jobs aside, some of the best developers in the world can only get 30-70% of the spec implemented).

Folks, I sincerely believe that if a developer is going to code bad, he/she is going to code bad whatever the language/spec (C, C++, C#, J#, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, HTML, XHTML, XML… there is bad code everywhere). And as long as we allow for margins of error (to err is human) somebody somewhere will exercise that margin (quirks mode anyone?).

By: Dana Lee Ling

Dana Lee Ling — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:32:43 +0000

I find the clean simplicity of HTML 5 much to my own liking. I write XHTML when I have to embed SVG and MathML, but otherwise I run with HTML 4.01 strict. I found I could get a validating HTML 5 page put together in under 30 seconds and without looking at reams of documentation. And the page displays in both IE7 and FireFox 2 – something the XHTML pages using an .xhtml extension and SVG fail to do (in IE7). HTML 5 simply works. Simple is better – may simpler carry the day.

By: terry xu

terry xu — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:18:44 +0000

Most W3C standards are just guidelines. No smart company would play strictly by the rules, coz that only means they are falling behind. W3C is not supreme court. Orgs who get their docs in W3C are not judges either.

But I still curious what they are proposing in HTML 5 though.

By: stuart

stuart — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:12:24 +0000

What is the point?
standards are great – but the browsers have still not obeyed them after all this time. Standards do not work as intended, why not put more effort into educating browser authors into obeying rules before changing the rules? They cannot even hit a static target, so why keep it moving?

Once they browsers can all obey CSS, HTML and JavaScript(ECMA) as intended by standards, then think about enhancing them. They need to work together on this one.

Web developers have been going crazy for years and things are not improving. Man, it’s 2007 not 1994.

By: Rav

Rav — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:28:58 +0000

If you can’t stop them…
Join them!

HTML 5.0 Will be a standards cocktail.
Lucky for us we have IE “The Super Blender”

By: raj

raj — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:44:15 +0000

I could swear that about 5 yrs ago, the W3C stated that HTML 4.0 would be replaced by XHTML 1.0, and HTML would not be further developed. This is what I was worried: standards schism

By: kj

kj — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:48:21 +0000

And as far as I can tell there’s no good reason why document.write() shouldn’t work in an XML environment anyway. Browsers are great at parsing text into DOM nodes, and if the document.write would result in invalid XML, either attempt to clean it up or throw an error.

If we give up on the idea of XML being text, we might as well just define a binary DOM format to pass around and stop wasting bandwidth…

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:12:27 +0000

Oh, and besides, XHTML2 won’t be treated as application/xml+xhtml until IE supports XML. So there’s no reason to believe iframes would be broken in XHTML2 anyway, for a long time coming. I dunno about document.write(), having no experience with it, but I suspect it’d work too with XHTML2 served as text/html.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:10:33 +0000

Thatâ€™s a fascinating theory, Roman. You think that Google has decided, instead of paying an engineer for a couple of days to adapt AdSense to work in XHTML2, to pay Ian Hickson for years to write an entirely new HTML specification in the hope that the existence of the specification will prevent people from using XHTML2.
Fascinating, but also hilarious.

Yeah, basically, AdSense is forever set in stone, and Google is going to destroy the Internet to avoid ever having to update their code.

Because obviously document.write() is the wave of the future, and they could never, oh, I dunno, make AdSense work similarly to a million other web applications that don’t rely on document.write() or iframes.

I mean, honestly, Roman. I hate AdSense. If I thought supporting XHTML2 could destroy AdSense forever, I’d be on board. Too bad it’s just completely delusional.

By: Roman

Roman — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:34:43 +0000

@Maciej, Adsense relies on document.write() which does not work in XML environments such as XHTML 2. I think Adsense also use IFRAME which is not part of XHTML 2.

@mpt, I am not unfairly singling out Google. Google is pushing HTML5 and employs the guy wrote is writing the HTML5 specification.

By: Maciej Stachowiak

Maciej Stachowiak — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:38:25 +0000

@Roman

Why wouldn’t AdSense work in XHTML2? All it needs is a tag and ability to modify the document. Do you have any idea what you are even talking about?

By: Dave Hyatt

Dave Hyatt — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:34:35 +0000

“dhyatt, if you donâ€™t want us to question your motives, then letâ€™s have some disclosure.”

I’m trying very hard to decide between a pony or my own personal jet pack. Or maybe some henchmen. Or a monocle. Or monocled henchmen… with jet packs!

So many options.

By: mpt

mpt — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:31:30 +0000

Roman, you’re unfairly singling out Google AdSense in particular. The Web wouldn’t work in XHTML 2.

By: Roman

Roman — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:03:15 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, Google Adsense and many Google applications will not work in XML environment such as XHTML 2. If the Web was to go XML, Google would loose a lot of money or have to spend a lot of money re-writing their apps. Apple, Mozilla and Opera have hitched their wagon to Google. Google does well, they do well. Google looses money, they loose money too.

Trevor, just follow the money and you will find the truth.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:26:16 +0000

But Apple is working actively to scuttle XHTML 2, which suggests its motive is money.

Er. How does “scuttling” XHTML 2 benefit Apple, or Google, financially?

By: Roman

Roman — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:21:12 +0000

@dhyatt, if you don’t want us to question your motives, then let’s have some disclosure. By some estimates, in the last 12 months, Mozilla received $80-$100 million in Google partnerships. How much did Apple get in Google partnerships?

We would not care so much how much Apple is making from Google, if Apple was simply indifferent to XHTML 2 and let the Web community make the decision. But Apple is working actively to scuttle XHTML 2, which suggests its motive is money. What else could it be?

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:24:22 +0000

lol @ dhyatt

I mean seriously, folks. If you want to talk about corporate greed in the tech industry and its horrible effects, there are much better targets than a proposed web standard. Try, for instance, environmental racism leading to the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of people around the world due to the waste created by computer equipment. Or try the slave labor conditions workers are subjected to in factories creating all our cool technogadgets.

This isn’t that hard. The world isn’t going to end because a bad web standard was proposed. But there are very real problems needing your attention. Choose your battles.

By: Dave Hyatt

Dave Hyatt — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:14:20 +0000

I would like to take the time to respond to this in detail, but my Evil Underling beeper has just gone off. My overlord and master Ian Hickson has summoned me to his underground lair beneath Google to discuss further our plans for global domination.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:17:13 +0000

Because breaking millions of existing pages is a great idea.

properly coded sites dont break. if your site breaks, learn how to code properly. if you cant, dont do websites. simple as that. i find it annoying how people dont care about the very little rules xhtml has and still expect their sites to work. by (gradually) decreasing fault tolerance in browsers, this nuisance could disappear once and for all.

By: David Smith

David Smith — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:11:46 +0000

Reading the comments on this is absolutely astonishing. Ian Hixon a corporate pawn? Mozilla, Opera, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all teaming up in a conspiracy to mess up the internet? What kind of bizarre parallel universe are you people living in?