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General WHATWG HTML5 specification - podcast suggestion

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    I'm not sure if this has come up in the forums before, but I just encountered the WHATWG HTML5 site (whatwg.org). This is news to me, and I have never before considered that there could be a viable alternative to XHTML.

    What's your opinion on this? After I got over the purist gag-reflex, I realised that it actually sounds pretty sensible. Also, I think this could make an excellent podcast topic!

    Thoughts? Flames?
    • CommentAuthorTom Morris
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2007
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    I'm on the HTML WG (anyone can be - the WHAT WG has basically been given domain over the HTML WG) and I'm sceptical about it - they've got some good ideas, but they seem to be basing their work on some really flawed presuppositions.

    For instance, a while back Hixie posted a message to the HTML WG mailing list saying "stop arguing and provide evidence". This is interesting, but it is presupposed on the availability of evidence. For something to become part of the HTML WG's recommendation it has to be in use. This is a deeply conservative movement, and it makes it difficult for things to change - because it'll 'break compatibility'. Yes, the HTML WG demands that HTML 5 be backwards compatible with HTML 4. Which means if something is broken in HTML 4, it may stay broken in HTML 5.

    The HTML WG want to keep the FONT tag - despite it being unsemantic and mostly disposed of from contemporary semantic design - because WYSIWYG tools use it. But they aren't keeping the attribute - they want it to use the style attribute. This is ridiculous! I mean, they want to keep FONT to keep compatibility with WYSIWYG, but the actual attributes that those WYSIWYG tools use instead of using semantic markup + CSS won't be there. When I read about the FONT tag debacle, it makes me want to just bang my head against the desk.

    Then there is things like the profile attribute. The profile attribute lets you specify a space-separated list of URLs that provide information about the semantic use of markup on a page. It also lets you provide a transformation to turn that data in to RDF using a technology called GRDDL. Both the HTML WG and XHTML WG have gotten rid of it because they claim that it's not being used. Evidence? Well, none that I can see. Every WordPress blog in the world uses it. There are a number of specialised user agents which use it. GRDDL is now a W3C Proposed Recommendation, but the HTML WG have just decided for no reason at all to remove it from the standards. I'm just in the middle of writing a report and starting a research project to prove that the world is actually using the profile attribute, even if the HTML WG doesn't think it does.

    The problem is that the HTML WG have a very narrow view of what a User Agent is. If it's a new or niche technology, it's of no interest to them. If Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer don't do anything with a piece of web technology then for certain people, nothing uses it. The more intelligent of them will recognize that assistive technology exists and that the Web needs to be accessible. But they completely disregard things like the Semantic Web which they think of as very 'pipe dreamy' stuff, but which is being implemented by people today on the public Web, and is already in considerably wide use in certain sectors (the health care, life sciences and biological field are widely using a lot of the stuff which the HTML WG dismiss as irrelevant in their daily work - hence the existence of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group at the W3C).

    I wrote recently that the W3C need to reconsider the process of standardisation and split it into Current Issues and Futures WG, and that for the core Web technologies - HTML, CSS and JavaScript - have both of these groups running concurrently and forever. Work on HTML should not stop - it should just reach natural lulls when it can be released.

    As for my own preference, I will continue to publish pages as XHTML 1.0 for the time being, and maybe switch to XHTML 1.1 as and when Internet Explorer usage drops away significantly (which I'm hoping it will - only 20% of visitors to my personal site are using IE).

    Neither the HTML WG nor XHTML WG fills me with confidence. It seems that both are often willing to trade away future extensibility to fix what ought to be temporary problems.
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    I'm too tired and I know too little about this to give you a proper response right now, but thanks for the reply.

    My gut feelings are that semantic markup is the greatest evolution in web design thus-far, but that some of the proposals (interactive elements; progress bars) sound really neat and useful. If those sort of features could be as easy to implement as standard HTML, it could really help to make the web more usable.

    But then I randomly read the 'dialog' tag proposal (which uses DD and DT tags!) and I really didn't understand the point of that.

    Anyway, I have some more reading to do...

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