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"any key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft..."

they are indeed. this looks like it will be the overhall that is indeed badly needed. i look farward to it with open arms.

""any key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft...""

I did see that. These same "key players" also worked on the other versions of HTML, as well as the CSS standard. I am hoping they follow through and make their browsers compliant. Well, 3 of those 4 are...and IE7 is better than IE6.

Edit: corrected typo and some of the grammar.

Edited 2007-12-04 21:43

I can't fathom how Microsoft can put so much time and effort into IE 7 and still get so many things wrong. It's much better than IE 6, which as a web developer, I finally just quit supporting because the level of suck was just too great, but still...

I look forward with great excitement to things like HTML5 and CSS3, but somehow I think the majority (read IE users) of the web won't benefit from them for a long, long, long, long time.

As a software developer myself, I can tell you that if you haven't hacked on something for a while, even a few months, it takes quite a bit of time just to get back up to speed on what the code does and how it all fits together. When I imagine for the amount of time IE6 sat essentially gathering dust and the complexity of such a project, I can well imagine many of the programmers working on it are only vaguely aware of how it works even a year later.

Another sad thing is all the bandwidth being wasted by useless flash banners, ads, "splash" pages, page headers, and Myspace widgets.

Sure, every now and then, it's ok for something like Google Video. But this is not the norm by far. Apparently companies like throwing away money on web designer click-monkeys. There's also hidden costs too, of course. If your entire site content is embedded in flash, you'll have to pay consultant fees to fix a misspelled word or update the employee list everytime someone quits. Thank g-d for flashblock, is all I have to say.

Actually, I'd rather noone used any colors at all on their sites so I could just set the default background and font color to my liking. Only a patheticly small amount of the web is actual content. The rest is useless garbage and fluff. Layout != content. Even this site is full of crap.

"Another sad thing is all the bandwidth being wasted by useless flash banners, ads, "splash" pages, page headers, and Myspace widgets."

It's called "advertising". It pays for all the free stuff you like to complain about!

"Actually, I'd rather noone used any colors at all on their sites so I could just set the default background and font color to my liking."

Install http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ and click Disable > Disable Page Colors

I'm sure you'll find pretty fast that its a silly idea.

Yes, I do use the webdev toolbar in FF. You're right, it would be a silly thing to do without doing away with all other forms of layout as well.

My ideal static HTML page has normal text content, not broken into a million pages. Images can be inline, if used with moderation and if they are on-topic. Any multimedia or non-standard file types should be linked to, with a note of the file type of the target (that way the user can decide what he wants to do with it). An occasional table is okay, if it is actuallly needed to display content, like in a chart of data.

In a web like this, the user can then make his own appearance decisions, like those I mentioned.

Another sad thing is all the bandwidth being wasted by useless flash banners, ads, "splash" pages, page headers, and Myspace widgets.

Right! I know it's advertising and freedom, etc., and I would never support any mandatory restrictions from any source. But really really hate noisy web pages. And I'm really really grateful to the guys that came up with Adblock.

quick guess on that last question: IE6...

yes, its nice to see that those media tags go in, but i worry about the should (not must) when it comes to ogg format.

i fear that we will still see pages (mostly the big media corp backed ones) that use stuff like wmv or something else that they can drm overload, with no ogg or other open format anywhere in sight.

still, i really hope that google goes html5+ogg on their googlevideo and youtube...

Why use OGG when a Flash-based format works on EVERY machine, and WMV works on the majority? Seems pointless to adopt an obsure format when there are better ones out there with mass-adoption already.

Because OGG is open-source, not controlled by a company, and Flash is NOT available on EVERY machine, and WMV also doesn't work everywhere Flash does not. If you think Flash works on every machine, you've led a limited existence in the computer world. When it comes to Flash, you're at the mercy of Adobe, directly or indirectly.

Using OGG (which is truly open) in place of Flash (which is not, and is controlled by a single company) for the web/HTML xxx version is very much a wiser thing for true platform independence without licensing issues.

Yeah, I admit I do lead a limited computing experience. IT just isn't a lifestyle choice for me.

I fail to see why it matters if Flash is owned by a company. What could Adobe do that would be so heinous as to make this an issue? At the very worst, if it severely inconveniences people, there's always Silverlight and yes, even Ogg if they can convince (normal) people that it is a better option than Microsoft's (who a are industry leaders, as opposed to a community of enthusiasts).

The way I see it, the only reason to ditch proprietry formats which are free to download and use, would be a matter of ideology, not practicality.

Be serious flash is just as much available as OGG the same rules apply you will have to install the codecs for ogg just like you will have to install flash. Being open-source is not always a good enough reason.

People love to scream because it is open source, in the grand scheme of things that means nothing if the processes are the same. By that I mean I still need to install some codec. Does windows support ogg out the box, NO, does OSX uuuhhhh No. does linux yes fine if the whole world was using linux.

However for the most part the scenario is the same some form of instllation. Again being opensource does not make it the correct choice.

Just because you can spot it's not controlled by one company does not mean that it is in many cases not the best solution.


Also as as side note you only have to look at the ODF foundation " It's open source" to see that it is not always best just to choose something because it is open-source. They eventually dropped off support for their own initiative. I am not saying that I am against ODF bacuse I supported it however I am saying that you can't always get caught up in the open source formats sometimes you have to choose a format where some one has a vested interest. other than openness.

Edited 2007-12-05 00:30

because both flash and wmv are proprietary formats.

ogg on the other hand is free, in both senses of the word. you can get codecs for it on nearly any platform out there.

another option for video would be divx/xvid.

and for the record, flash is just a container with a interface. the format used inside is h.263, vp6 in flash 8 and beyond, and h.264 coming by the looks of it.

and every machine? hardly...

As I said to the guy that got in before you, so what if they aren't open? They're free, and that's enough.

I'm curious to know what important platforms are out there that do not have Flash support. Windows? Check. Mac OS? Check. Hell, even Linux has a plugin for it.

Thanks for reminding me about the Flash bit though. I admit it is not my forte... that's Marketing's job. So if it supports any codec anyway, perhaps Flash is the way to go.... everyone wins! :o)

"Why use OGG when a Flash-based format works on EVERY machine"

You need to do more research. AFAICT, Flash only works on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. Flash support is poor on all BSD flavors, you can only use Flash 7 with the Linux Compatibility layer, and these days, most people export their Flash animations using Flash 9 format, so basically beside YouTube and some old Flash animations, you can say goodbye to Flash on *BSD. Thousands of people use BSD (http://www.bsdstats.org). Flash doesn't work on these systems either: Syllable, SkyOS, Amiga, Menuet, Haiku, RiscOS, you name it. So when you add all these relatively small communities, this accounts for a lot of people at the mercy of Adobe, a millionaire company that doesn't care about communities that aren't interesting from a financial standpoint. Adobe won't support these systems anytime soon, believe me, they're more interested in their crap like Flex or AIR that add even more bloat and proprietary lockin to the web.

This is why it is important to know that if your site is Flash-only, a whole bunch of people who have gone the open-source route will be unable to watch the content. If your site uses a Flash-based navigation bar, a SkyOS user won't pass the front page.

At this point, the solution is the open OGG format, like it or not, it works on all the aforementioned systems.

http://www.theora.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

OMG thousands of people!!! Let's completely ditch flash for those thousands of people who WILLINGLY CHOSE to use an OS that doesn't support most software or formats. How about I buy an old PDP-11 and then complain about how nobody supports it and companies are evil.

It is just sad that there are people out there who think that this is a real argument.

Most of these users unable view it becuase of OSS route are the kind of people to block flash and everything else except plain text so that, acording to one comment in this thread, they can style everything themselves.

At this point, the solution is for SkyOS users and everyone else to realise that Adobe and every other big software company are not going to develop something for a thousand or so users of minority OSs. Like it or not, there are reasons why the word minority exists.

What a load of cods wallop!
Flash does not work for me in 64bit Linux, neither does WMV work properly without me breaking laws and even then it doesn't work too good!

Why use OGG when a Flash-based format works on EVERY machine, and WMV works on the majority?

EVERY machine? I used NetBSD on one of my desktops for a couple years and I enjoyed it. But it was a source of irritation that I could never view Flash.

Ogg? What the hell is that? Sorry, it just isn't going to happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg

I know "what" it is. I meant, Ogg isn't going to replace anything any time soon.

You don't need html5 to view ogg media. It's doable today, if your browser has an appropriate plugin, or even using just java, as demonstrated at http://www.flumotion.com/en/textos.php?id=22

true, but in todays media rich web, having to rely on plugins at all is, in one word, "old".

the reason people use flash is because it protects content from being stolen. And no one has bothered to hack it because in the end what would you get? a crap quality mpg? a 92kbps .wav? just go bit torrent at that rate. So in many ways Hollywood (music & film) are shooting them selves in the foot by trying to keep everything so covered up because it only encourages people to pirate.

they're the reason why most sites like youtube use flash.

1.1.1. Relationship to HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1, DOM2 HTML

This section is non-normative.

This specification represents a new version of HTML4 and XHTML1, along with a new version of the associated DOM2 HTML API. Migration from HTML4 or XHTML1 to the format and APIs described in this specification should in most cases be straightforward, as care has been taken to ensure that backwards-compatibility is retained.

----------------

Sorry but ignoring XHTML is the last thing you want to do. Learning the well-formed structure of XML and XHTML is what you need to quickly adopt HTML 5 which is an XML compliant language.

If you had of read the article you would have known the HTML 5 is SGML not XML. XHTML 5 is XML compliant.

HTML5 is not SGML. Most of all because no browser every implemented HTML4 correctly as SGML compliant. Instead HTML5 describes in detail its own parsing technique, which in a stroke of genius happens to be a compatible parsing technique to what every browsers does to HTML4.

So if you ever want to find a document describing how even HTML4 is parsed, the HTML5 standard is the best match.

Oops. I should have read more closely. Its inspired by SGML. Thanks for the clarification.

That's silly, since xhtml is not very much different than html... only it adheres to certain rules that can make your life easier later.

Ignoring it you might miss out on a lot of interesting technologies and evolutions... that are possible precisely because of the structured way of xhtml.

In a way it's like correct spelling. With bad spelling, readers will still be able to understand what you write, but software that has to interpret it in some way sure as hell will get confused.

Of course if you only build a small website it might not matter all that much.

Actually XHTML is a lot different in techniques. Most importantly of all it isn't used correctly anywhere on the web (mostly because IE can't handle it).

However, yhat doesn't stop people from writing mock-XHTML which is parsed by browsers as quirky HTML, with all kinds of subtle bugs as a result.

This absolutely insane abuse of XHTML, is what has caused W3C, WhatWG, and all browser makers to discourage the use of XHTML. It is essentially deprecated, and considered a failed experiment.

why not XHTML? the XML rules are pretty simple and universal. and you dont have to remember which tags have to be closed and which dont.

and, XHTML can be parsed by a script much more easily than HTML can.

and, XHTML is easier to debug. instead of spending minutes searching for that missing tag, the browser will tell you in plain english "You're missing a tag", and point you to the location (or near it anyway).

CSS (and layout in general) isn't part of HTML (or more specifically, xhtml), it is its own spec, and can be applied to any XML varient.

That being said, you learn to live with what you have. I very, very rarely will use absolute positioning though. margin and divs are your friends.

I agree with the layout comments. Sometimes it seemed as if CSS and the HTML specs never met the need of easy layout. I look at the code of people's sites now and some are still using tables, some use CSS with DIVs thst cludge everything together. I am surprised that something like content flowing columns was never added. It seemed so intuitive and needed. I think it still easier to nest text inside of tables because of the way they expand and flow nicely. Are columns even in HTML5 or did they consider it unnecessary and instead invent more complicated syntax. The evolution of HTML seems like the web designers that have to design in it everyday their voices and realistic needs for production were never listened to.

Edited 2007-12-05 00:28

I believe that CSS 3 has columns support, and CSS is where visual formatting information is supposed to go.

'of HTML seems like the web designers that have to design in it everyday their voices and realistic needs for production were never listened to. '

Of course they weren't listened to. Read through the comments in this thread (or any other at OSnews for that matter) and see the hatred towards anything design orientated, or graphical. 'Screw all technologies, web pages should be just plain text' is the immpression most of them give, unfortunately, the kind of people leaving these comments are the kind of people who are anal enough to spend there freetime drawing up and commenting or W3C specs.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/

``The current HTML working group charter was issued on 7 March 2007. The group is chartered to continue its work through 31 December 2010.''

"Due to the requirement to produce test cases and achieve interoperable implementations, current estimates have work finishing in around ten to fifteen years."

That seems pretty insane. That just can't be. I can see shooting for three years having everything worked out but really not getting everyone on board for another three to four years after that being a reality. I don't care if it is the greatest thing ever if it takes fifteen years we will obviously be using something like flash or silverlight for everything.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#evolution-not-revoluti...

2.5. Evolution Not Revolution

Revolutions sometimes change the world to the better. Most often, however, it is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away. This way, authors don't have to learn new models and content will live longer. Specifically, this means that one should prefer to design features so that old content can take advantage of new features without having to make unrelated changes. And implementations should be able to add new features to existing code, rather than having to develop whole separate modes.

Switching to XML syntax requires a global change, so continue supporting classic HTML syntax as well.

Anyone who uses XML will most certainly use XML complaint syntax that is first citizen for HTML 5.

Without XML analness well get the nonstandard compliant mess of html 4. I like the XHTML approach "if it's not correct you don't have to render it". This will force tool vendors to make sure their editors generate proper tags and will make parsing html for its data much easier.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

It depends on your design goals and the audience in which you want to interact with:

1.4.1. HTML vs XHTML

This section is non-normative.

This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.

The in-memory representation is known as "DOM5 HTML", or "the DOM" for short.

There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.

The first such concrete syntax is "HTML5". This is the format recommended for most authors. It is compatible with all legacy Web browsers. If a document is transmitted with the MIME type text/html, then it will be processed as an "HTML5" document by Web browsers.

The second concrete syntax uses XML, and is known as "XHTML5". When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is processed by an XML processor by Web browsers, and treated as an "XHTML5" document. Generally speaking, authors are discouraged from trying to use XML on the Web, because XML has much stricter syntax rules than the "HTML5" variant described above, and is relatively newer and therefore less mature.

The "DOM5 HTML", "HTML5", and "XHTML5" representations cannot all represent the same content. For example, namespaces cannot be represented using "HTML5", but they are supported in "DOM5 HTML" and "XHTML5". Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be represented using "HTML5", but cannot be represented with "XHTML5" and "DOM5 HTML". Comments that contain the string "-->" can be represented in "DOM5 HTML" but not in "HTML5" and "XHTML5". And so forth.

You don't need to be a member of the board to voice your comments. You need only join the mailing list, and anyone can join.

"The Frontpage-ification of the Internet continues."

Of the Web, which is a subset of the Internet's services. :-)

According to your odd bits collection I'd like to comment the following ones:

"-- Using Unicode throughout the document... but then specifying that browsers need only support UTF-8 and Windows-1252... and specifying encodings that 'must not' (?!) be implemented."

When you can use UFT-8 for everything (claimed), so why there's "Windows-1252"? What about the standardized ISO charsets?

"-- Including end tags when none were necessary before."

I think that's a tribute to the XML / XHTML standard style specification where end tags were forced,

a) as a real end tag

<foo>this is a foo style content</foo>

b) as a "all in one" tag

<bar param1="val1" param2="val2) />

"-- Specifying that browsers may not play load events until pictures are loaded (what if the picture never loads) (and the article even explains how that behavior can be used to simplify the hijacking of a user's computer!)."

I think that's strange. What if a browser does not load any pictures because of its setting to load none? What about text mode browsers (essential means for blind users to access the web)?

-- Lazy coding ('div' tags) now going to spread with 'footer', 'header', etc. tags. This is similar to including 'em' and 'code' dags when 'b' and 'tt' already did what the 'new' tags done.

This is the separation of content and form as I mentioned it in my previous post when I compared this kind of text structurin to the LaTeX way. As a web developer, you don't need to specify a certain font style attribute (bold, italics), you just go on a higher level when you define a text to be emphasized and let the browser take care of it, depending on its individual setting how it will display emphasized text. You can concentrate on your actual document structure instead of doing ugly microformatting. I think that's a chance for simplification on the developer's side.

"-- Still hasn't standardized attribute names among disparate tags.

I agree, that's something I'd like to see, especially along with a look to CSS. Or, in other words: same attribute names for similar functionalities in HTML and CSS.

"-- Still lacks a 'macro' or 'define' tag for common code that is repeated throughout a page.
-- Still lacks an 'include' tag."

That's what SSI can be used for. Or abuse cpp -P on your HTML files before uploading them. Write a Makefile . :-)

% make
cpp -P index.html.pp > index.html
% make upload

Don't mind, it's a dirty hack anyway.

"(This and the former are the reason that that symptom of the Frontpage disease, CSS, have spread so quickly.)"

Exacerbatio generalis of Morbus Frontopaginalis with a comorbide attack of Micromollis fenestrae perspectivo editio ultimata? =^_^=

"-- Audio/video tags: Browser-dependent way to show files using an interface you know nothing about."

The interface should be definable by the browser, or, to be more correct, by the user. For example, some users like to have a frame with a pushbutton to launch a fullscreen video player instead of a little instand player within the page, others like an option to download a movie clip instead of playing it.

The web developer should not need to know anything about the client's configuration. Standardized behaviour could be assumed if every browser would adopt to these standards. But as we all know, MICROS~1's browsers won't, as usual.

***

I'm just staring at the screen:
http://www.alistapart.com/d/previewofhtml5/html5.jpg

I'm asking myself: What's that in this box? A smiling pudding? A pile of dust or washing powder? An egg? Can somebody tell? :-)

Edited 2007-12-05 01:01

I think it's a russian doll. If you look at the side of the box, you see the 4 smaller variants in order. And I guess the analog is with each HTML version encapsulating and extending the previous version.

"I think it's a russian doll. If you look at the side of the box, you see the 4 smaller variants in order. And I guess the analog is with each HTML version encapsulating and extending the previous version."

Hey, you're right - I didn't recognize this. The russian doll you've mentioned is called a MATPE"WKA (matryoshka, matroska). The analogy makes sense, too. Thanks for this clue!

A lot of what you mentioned is called a synamtic design of the web. HTML is supposed to describe content, not layout, that is what CSS is for. b and i and tt are deprecated as those are layout tags. strong, em, code are meant to describe whats inside the tags, now how to format them, and may not actually make text bold, etc, depending on the device. Excessively compatible with XHTML/XML? That should be considered a good thing that HTML will comply to other standards... finally.

The specification already includes at least two tags -- 'audio' and 'video' -- whose implementation are left completely up to the browser.

Soon, the three major browsers will be divided by a common standard...

Yeah, and as with HTML 4, anything without an implementation specifically defined will get rendered differently by the browsers.

Of course, people will blame MS for this and say IE gets it wrong again even though it was just left up to the browser to handle rendering, like so many of the rendering problems that are claimed to be IEs fault with HTML 4

Left completely up to the browser?
The API is defined, the behaviour is defined, the only free control they have is browser controls (and now sadly codecs too).

The audio and video tags were neutered by both Microsoft and Apple because they claim Ogg isn't safe (patent-wise), even