HTML 5 is dead?
Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2011 3:05 pm
It looks like we're definitely not in Kansas anymore. And maybe we're not even in the universe we thought we knew up till the 18th of January 2011.
Just when the W3C launched the new logo for HTML5 (It looks like a shirt badge for a superhero comic to me. I don't like it.) See http://www.w3.org/html/logo/ for the full glory.
The WHAT WG announces that HTML 5 is no more. It's now HTML and it will be a rolling standard. No snapshots, i.e. hard and fast written specs. Instead we will have a set of moving goalposts, though there's a promise that it will always be backward compatible.
See http://bit.ly/fQGoNs for Ian Hickson's announcement.
I got wind that something like this was in the wind, I thought it might happen years from now.
Gone are the days of saying a page is XHTML 4 transitional. I guess we'll have to say it's now HTML-2011-01-21:12:00:00Z or somesuch if we want to be precise.
I haven't processed whether this can actually happen, what the push back will be and what it means for me, CSE etc. Here's a few stream of consciousness thoughts.
1) To define what you've done you'll need something like the specification above. Presumably there'll be something like daily drops of the standard, so it might be more like HTML (formerly HTML 5) version 6.23.1 with an optional 2011-11-11 11:11:11Z.
2) CSE won't be able to define standards like currently does. An interesting challenge.
3) CSE might need to publish updates more often. Maybe with a update plug-in service, automagically distributed!
4) For those of us who need to use XHTML I don't know what this means. I'm increasingly using code to work with markup (and go beyond the extreme limitations of markup) so I want it well formed and rational. Need to establish if this is a disaster.
5) Will browsers get even more out of synch than they are at present. In fact will they say let's forget it and just do our own thing (after all this standard is no longer a real standard anyway).
6) Where will this leave ventures like the developer only plug ins that IE has introduced (in IE 9) to isolate experimental from in the standard. I thought that was a really sane move, I was hoping it would become common in browsers, now I just don't know what'll happen.
7) Chrome OS looks like it's dying, what impact will this have on that.
8) Some mobile devices, especially Android device it seems, essentially never get an update. Will this create a new ghetto of old and no longer cool/hip web viewing machine. (In months, weeks, days or maybe even find them all launched-as-legacy-devices.)
9) Is this a kickback against the announcement from W3C (with that logo announcement) that HTML5 now means, CSS and a slew of other things.
What's your take?
Just when the W3C launched the new logo for HTML5 (It looks like a shirt badge for a superhero comic to me. I don't like it.) See http://www.w3.org/html/logo/ for the full glory.
The WHAT WG announces that HTML 5 is no more. It's now HTML and it will be a rolling standard. No snapshots, i.e. hard and fast written specs. Instead we will have a set of moving goalposts, though there's a promise that it will always be backward compatible.
See http://bit.ly/fQGoNs for Ian Hickson's announcement.
I got wind that something like this was in the wind, I thought it might happen years from now.
Gone are the days of saying a page is XHTML 4 transitional. I guess we'll have to say it's now HTML-2011-01-21:12:00:00Z or somesuch if we want to be precise.
I haven't processed whether this can actually happen, what the push back will be and what it means for me, CSE etc. Here's a few stream of consciousness thoughts.
1) To define what you've done you'll need something like the specification above. Presumably there'll be something like daily drops of the standard, so it might be more like HTML (formerly HTML 5) version 6.23.1 with an optional 2011-11-11 11:11:11Z.
2) CSE won't be able to define standards like currently does. An interesting challenge.
3) CSE might need to publish updates more often. Maybe with a update plug-in service, automagically distributed!
4) For those of us who need to use XHTML I don't know what this means. I'm increasingly using code to work with markup (and go beyond the extreme limitations of markup) so I want it well formed and rational. Need to establish if this is a disaster.
5) Will browsers get even more out of synch than they are at present. In fact will they say let's forget it and just do our own thing (after all this standard is no longer a real standard anyway).
6) Where will this leave ventures like the developer only plug ins that IE has introduced (in IE 9) to isolate experimental from in the standard. I thought that was a really sane move, I was hoping it would become common in browsers, now I just don't know what'll happen.
7) Chrome OS looks like it's dying, what impact will this have on that.
8) Some mobile devices, especially Android device it seems, essentially never get an update. Will this create a new ghetto of old and no longer cool/hip web viewing machine. (In months, weeks, days or maybe even find them all launched-as-legacy-devices.)
9) Is this a kickback against the announcement from W3C (with that logo announcement) that HTML5 now means, CSS and a slew of other things.
What's your take?