Web devs gasp: HTML5 takes big step toward standardization The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has moved ahead with plans to develop the next two versions of the HTML web markup language, having released new draft specifications of HTML5, HTML 5.1, and related standards. On Monday, the web standards body published the first "candidate recommendation" of HTML5, bringing the standard to …
Of course HTML5 is not yet set completely in stone but the other browser makers sure have implemented a lot more of the soon to be final standard than Microsoft. Greenhopper is a fairly common AGILE tool and its pretty embarrassing that Microsoft's latest non beta browser doesn't support enough HTML5 for the web app to work properly.
So, when the stardards to arrive, they will arrive via pair? I understand clear thought and due process is needed when formulating standards, but it is HTML. If you want it to look and work right in all browsers, then starting off with 2 seems like the 50/50 approach to functionality to me. So what is it, <DOCTYPE HTML> and <DOCTYPE HTML.1> ? Or at last is sensible versioning going to appear <DOCTYPE HTML 5.1> ? No matter, clear the standards seem divided at boot.
I cant understand why MS has been so slow to implement things like canvas - you know the sort of elements that would make it really easy to redo all of their software in html and take away their revenue stream.
And who else have we got in the standards organisation that wouldn’t like things like that .. Adobe and Apple.
My goodness you'd almost think they'd joined in the standardisation process to slow things down!
But as the saying goes ish 'never attribute something to evil that can be accounted for by stupidity'.
MS aren't promoting Silverlight for the PC so the assertion they don't want HTML5 makes little sense when they are gearing their tools around it.
Adobe has Flash but similarly seems set/resigned it is on the way out, they seem to be killing it faster than they need to if anything. HTML5 content tools are a massive money pit for Adobe.
Apple don't have a rich web alternative of their own. So unless you think they simply want everything done as a native app rather than a website, which seems a little like a conspiracy theory, that doesn't work either.
More likely, MS and Apple are simply tremendously conservative because they have to support their browsers for several years, unlike Chrome and Firefox who just release a new version and change their minds on feature-sets without the need to provide enterprise support.
Microsoft are always glacially slow in implementing anything to do with standards on their festering turd of a browser.
At the moment IE10 scores 320 on html5test.org; just about all other proper browsers are now scoring 400 or much more. It'll be IE11 before they will increase that score, always behind all other browsers.
A living standard? What exactly does that mean? Because it sounds like it means it's not a standard at all, just a document listing what the current popular browsers are implementing. While quite useful in day to day coding that's not really what the standards process is about.
On a serious note, it's actually a "very good thing" (tm). The problem with the W3C's standardisation process is that it's glacially slow, way slower than many other standardisation processes out there. Unnecessarily slow. The issue is essentially that there are too many cooks. Compare with the WHATWG, which is a consortium of browser vendors and designers/developers that are actually implementing this stuff. It's ready to use in the majority browsers now. The reason that the WHATWG works so well is that there is a single editor, at the moment employed by Google, who is overseeing the development of HTML and for the large part, it's working and it's working better than the W3C. Did I mention how slow the W3C is. I've heard rumour that they started work on the current spec shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct.
A living standard? That's a cracker.
A living standard is completely useless to everyone because no one knows what is actually standard in the language. Developers would need to decide which browser(s) they want to support, look up their capabilities and write HTML just for that. Time consuming, a pain in the ass and will end up excluding some users because they aren't using the right browser. Welcome to the late 90s.
That's progress for you.
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