InfoWorld's Peter Wayner discusses the 11 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, synchonization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-12
I'm not seeing where you get that as I am in fact arguing in FAVOR of semantics -- and that's my problem with the new tags as they muddy the water by applying extra meanings we don't need. It's like the nimrods who go around slapping P around EVERYTHING just because it happens to be text or in flow. (P around IMG comes to mind)... A LABEL/INPUT pairing is not a paragraph or list item or table cell. Putting a P around it is pointlessly applying the wrong semantics... To me, putting NAV around a UL is that same type of idiocy... or DIV#header vs. HEADER when a numbered heading tag (H1,H2, etc), maybe with SMALL for de-emphasis and a couple span as styling hooks can typically handle that all by itself.
But then I always hated id="nav" or class="nav" -- so NAV as a tag is going to annoy me as being pointlessly vague. EVERY BLASTED ANCHOR ON A PAGE is "navigation" -- doesn't narrow it down a whole lot on meaning. Are we supposed to now wrap it around everything that has an anchor in it? I think not. Pointless bloated element that exists NOT for the accessibility bullshit they claim, but to justify the people who put that extra div around their UL for NOTHING. Probably why I use classes and ID's like "mainMenu", "userMenu", etc...
NOT IF WHAT GOES INSIDE THEM ARE THE EXISTING SEMANTIC TAGS (H1, H2, P, UL, OL... even HR) -- at which point wrapping them with ANOTHER semantic meaning ... well, that's shellac on a pile. Covering a turd in bug excrement isn't the answer, no matter how shiny and new it looks.
I think that's what you're missing -- I don't see the point of these allegedly semantic new tags if they're just going around tags that already have meanings. That's called pointless bloat!
Member since:2006-01-25
This is how I interpret the new tags...
NAV = The stuff here consists of primary navigation links. If you are looking for the collection of links that the author identifies as authoritive this website you just found it.
HEADER = The stuff here is NOT part of the primary content of this page, it is decorational and/or contains index/navigation items that are not related to the primary content.
FOOTER = Semantically means exactly the same thing as HEADER, it simply allows for a distinction between things that come before the document and things that come after.
ARTICLE = This stuff here is a self-contained document that is capable of standing on its own. If you want to just grab the meat of this page this is what you want.
ASIDE = Stuff that isn't critical to the rest of the content on the page (like the news sidebar on this site)
SECTION = Arbitrary way to divy things up if you so choose to. I'm not a big fan of this one because it seems to me exactly the same thing as what DIV was supposed to be.
MENU = Everyone thinks menu is a bit "off"... which is why no one supports it. Since no one supports it it probably won't be around much longer (unless someone can think of a way to actually use it effectively)
Anyway, I won't go through them all, because most of the remaining ones are not terribly useful. HTML5 is not perfect - never said it was. I just don't see why you are so hell bent against it. At least some of the semantic tags make a lot of sense - your contention that they all just replicate existing tags doesn't jive for me at all. Sure, you can hack a lot of the existing semantic tags into whatever you want them to mean, but then you have lost their initial meaning. For example, an H1 should be the top level heading in a document - a HEADER of a webpage is something else entirely - HTML5 just makes that distinction explicit.
It brings in new tags primarily to recognize the fact that "documents" that exist outside of the web (which contain their own existing semantic structure) need a way to be incorporated into existing website structure without having to heavily modify either the website or the document. If you don't see the logic in this I don't know what else I can tell you to convince you.
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.
This is one of those news items that's fun to write, fun to read, fun to comment on, and where no one will be able to say anything unkind. It's all just one big ball of awesome fluffiness. TuneTracker, the BeOS radio automation software, has just released something very special: TuneTracker System 5, the first version designed entirely and specifically for Haiku. In fact, it actually includes Haiku in the software package. Better yet, TuneTracker also unveiled several system-in-a-box products - which have Haiku and TuneTracker pre-installed.
Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.They're here! Whether that excites you or not remains to be seen, but the Galaxy S4, which will most likely become the best selling Android smartphone of the year by a huge margin, has been reviewed by all the major sites, and there's lots of interesting conclusions in there - although I think most of you will get the gist.Nokia has posted its quarterly results for the first quarter of 2013, and just like the quarters that came before, there's not a whole lot of good news in there. The rise in Lumia sales still can't even dream of making up for the sales drop in Symbian phones, and when broken down in versions, the sales figures for Windows Phone 8 Lumias in particular are very disappointing. In North America, Nokia is getting slaughtered.
Member since:
2005-07-12
encourages people to add extra wrapping tags for NOTHING. See the dipshits who right now do nonsense like wrapping a div around a single UL just to give it an ID -- when the UL by itself is a perfectly good block level element for attaching styling to. 99% of the layouts where they were doing DIV#NAV and now use NAV that extra wrapper is POINTLESS.
... AND it's an extra element on the DOM, something search engines are FINALLY taking sites to task for with their speed analyzer... All for something that frankly, ARIA Roles make a hell of a lot more sense for.
You mean like the EXISTING tags of numbered headings and ul?
Dom size... or the EXISTING semantic tags. I don't need HEADER, FOOTER or NAV, I know how to use H1/H2/H3/H4/H5/H6/UL/P/HR properly. (yes, HR -- end of topic/ section started by a heading!)... It is NOTHING more than bloat for the dips who wrap DIV around elements for NOTHING -- the only other reason for having div around something like a foooter is for PRESENTATION -- at which point you shouldn't be attaching more meaning to it in the first place!
But then, I've rarely seen anyone use HR for what it's for or put numbered headings in a sensible order for layout navigation on things like screen readers -- multiple H1's, skipping heading numbers, having low order (high numbered) headings before the H1... Mish-mash of idiocy.
As is every other blasted type of formatting meaning there's no single consistent formatting rule -- just sleaze it together any old way... Yeah, that's progress. Thank you for providing your own example
Adopting tags like EMBED into the specification when it was originally rejected as redundant to OBJECT? Bringing back deprecated tags like MENU? Adding dozens of new tags when nobody can be bothered to use the ones we already have properly? (TH, THEAD, TBODY, CAPTION, LEGEND and LABEL for example!) 4 STRICT was not just about getting rid of presentational tags (FONT, CENTER, BASEFONT, U), but also redundancies (DIR, MENU, APPLET, S, STRIKE)... Now a whole slew of pointless redundant tags are being dumped in -- sounds like a backslide to me!
Which could just as easily have been added to OBJECT.
Which IMG was originally on the chopping block for OBJECT too, and could have been abandoned if Microsoft hadn't made such a broken OBJECT implementation... Still the best way to show jpeg2k though -- but of course we're going to be using .gif, .png and normal jpeg until we're old and gray as there's no way any better format could EVER come along...
On something that isn't content and/or is strictly presentational when not present... Rule #1 of good javascript, enhance not supplant... and auto-attach insted of manually hooking in the markup. (Naturally the people who vomit up bloated jquery bull will never understand that)
The only reason I can see it being useful is that it works like object for wrapping scripting off content... So I'll give you that. Still, it would be MUCH more useful if we could use it to draw extra stuff on existing elements... Something VML, SVG and Canvas are all pretty much useless for.
Hell, I'd love to see a vector language added to CSS so you could draw on the background bitmap -- much like the one created by linear-gradient. THAT would be useful.
They are when the semantics are dubious and are used to WRAP OTHER SEMANTIC TAGS -- like H1... like UL... like P... Then you're just stacking semantics and making the document structure dozens of times more complicated than it needs to be. We have enough semantic tags as it sits, adding extra WRAPPING tags to go around wrapping tags? That's just STUPID... Especially when you take DOM size into consideration (Even more so with jquery and other scripttards going through the entire dom to attach their stuff with getElementsByClassName or getElementsByTagName)
Only reason they exist is to target them via hash, scripting or CSS... Using semantic tags usually involves using less classes and ID's...
I dont' see them as useful -- at all. I see them as 100% bloat because if the tags inside them -- H1, P, A, HR -- already are conveying information, what purpose does adding any of that extra crap around them serve besides justifying the bloat of people who wrap extra DIV around things for nothing that couldn't be applied to the existing tags. I can understand DIV for grouping tags into sections, but I'm not changing or adding meaning by doing so -- Nor would I WANT TO.
... and XHTML 2 was a fat bloated train wreck of unneccssary crap too. Who'd have thought HTML 5 would end up being a retread of bad ideas, I suppose though you're right, it doesn't make it worse, it just adds tags to artificially justify the half-assed coding techniques of the people who still have their head permanently wedged up 1997's backside.
Apart from the loosening of the rules, encouraging extra dom elements that serve no real purpose, adding back in tags that were deprecated for a reason, putting back in redundancies and adding even more new ones...
Gonna have to break this into two parts.