Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the ideal of a truly standards-compliant Web will ever be possible given ongoing disagreements over HTML 5, including those most recently set in motion by Microsoft's latest concerns over the spec. "While some items on Microsoft's list seem like quibbles, others are valid issues," McAllister writes. And with others in the working group supporting the proposed additions in question as they stand, an impasse could conceivably be the end result. "Disagreements are an inevitable part of any standardization process. But if disagreements lead to irreconcilable differences, it calls in to question the validity of the final standard." So where does that leave HTML 5?
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Member since:2005-11-21
What was wrong with the old tag?
I'm no HTML author/"programmer", but I also read pretty harsh comments about the new tag.
Like you said, you're not web developer.
The audio/video tags encapsulate all the ugly that object does not. Flash comes to mind as how damn ugly it is to get it to work and all the hacks here and there for CDATA and earlier browsers.
Member since:2006-09-12
So new elements <audio> and <video> are needed to fix the old unsatisfactory handling of <object type=mimetype> by clients?
That doesn't exactly make sense... <object type=mimetype> means to the client: "Here is an object of type mimetype, can you handle it?" It's then up to the client to use some way to display the content. If the client uses some shoddy plugin, that offers incomplete control of the content, it's not HTMLs domain anymore.
One feature of <audio>, <video> are script accessibility and playback control. While this is nice for "multimedia application" websites, I feel it's wrong. The document written in Hypertext Markup got served... not the application written in Hyperapplication Markup, or some such.
What the W3C, WHATWG and their ilk should be doing, is separating applications and documents and the way each is served. So they could create HAML (Hyper Application Markup Language) which is transfered via HATP (Hyper Application Transfer Protocol) and deprecate all scripting in HTML to turn those back into the static interlinkable documents they once were.
Then those "web designers" that need to make every document as flashy, blinky, clicky as possible, can just use HAML and they and the W3C can bash each others heads in over (scriptable) <audio>, <video>, (the clearly application related) <progress> and such.
Member since:
2005-07-06
For example, <audio> and <video> are completely useless.
What was wrong with the old <object> tag?
I'm no HTML author/"programmer", but I also read pretty harsh comments about the new <div item> tag.