After 10 years of waiting
This story has been up for some hours now, and yet nobody has made a comment. Did everyone fall asleep?
Yes, Virginia, there IS a W3C HTML5 standard – as of now, that is
After nearly 10 years of development, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has promoted the HTML5 specification to Recommendation status, its highest level of maturation, effectively making the markup language a formal web standard. "For application developers and industry, HTML5 represents a set of features that people will be …
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 10:15 GMT sabroni
Does this make any difference?
If you're not old enough to remember the upset and distress caused by IE6 and it's non-standard ways, and you're happy for Google to be the one's setting the agenda now, then no. If you think all browsers should be capable of rendering all web pages then yes.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 13:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Does this make any difference?
"If you think all browsers should be capable of rendering all web pages then yes."
Apart from the DRM of course. And the patents (which affect what codecs are supported). And...
If it is to be open, then the entire stack has to be open and unencumbered by patents etc.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 14:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If it is to be open, information wants to be free, I hate paying for stuff...
No, if it's in the standards then all browsers should support DRM too. And codec support and failover is already specced and in use, it's in the video tag.
A clearly defined interface to a black box is still a standard. If I plug it in and it works then why do I have to understand the inner workings?
Stop bitching. The standard isn't exactly as you'd like it. Suck it up and move on.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 09:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's great that we finally have a recommended spec but it's too late (as usual) to make any real difference. To be honest though I'm happy with the way HTML has developed and is developing. The browsers are in competition with each other but are broadly pulling in the same direction making cross browser sites rate as only frustrating to develop rather than the rage inducing nightmare they used to be. If I could have one new thing for the web it would be a decent programming language. JavaScript gets the job done but it's an absolutely awful language when you step back and look at it. I don't suppose I'll get my wish any time soon though.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 10:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: but it's an absolutely awful language when you step back and look at it
I disagree. Just back on c# after a couple of years of mainly JS. Seeing the way they've tried to bodge 'loose typing' into # is embarrassing. I know that for server side stuff the compile time checks can add a bit of robustness, but in reality that seems a little over-rated, bad code can still generate crappy errors that are difficult to debug at runtime.
The big difference between js and other contemporary languages is that bad programmers can be forced to write relatively safe code in a strongly typed, compiled language, but when set loose with js they can cause chaos. But that's doesn't make js crap, just more difficult to use well. When used well js is awesome, incredibly compact yet infinitely flexible.
Don't worry, there are already plenty of worrying noises about adding 'proper typing' and 'proper inheritance' and a whole load of other 'things that we're used to' to js, it'll be fucked soon enough.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 12:20 GMT sabroni
Re: Strong typing would at least have thrown an error.
And spending two minutes learning about javascript's aggressive casting before you started coding would've helped too. JS is not strongly typed. Trying to use it as if it is is never going to work. Nevertheless it's a programming language and there are rules (it'll coerce to the type on the left of the ==, for example*).
Posting "I didn't learn how it worked and it was different than I guessed" puts you at fault, not JS. If you don't like it once you've learnt it then that's a different issue. But complaining that it's not strongly typed is like complaining that your apple isn't orangey enough.
*(use ===, not ==, no coercion!!)
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 12:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Enough said
No, that's not really enough at all.
Just because no-one's broken down a separate book about the good bits of c# (for example) doesn't mean it's all good. As someone who's expected to use it I can assure you it's not. For example, pretending you can pass a loosely typed object to a constructor is no help if as soon as you try and pass a slightly different object you get a compile error. That's still shit, even if it's not in a special book.
The Good Parts of javascript are exactly that. Don't use the bad parts. You might hate liver but I bet that doesn't stop you eating steak...
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 22:06 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: "Javascript: The Good Parts" - 176 pages"
I bought that book the other week and I'd recommend it.
The page comparison can be read however you like. One way of reading it is to say that inside the 1096-page crawling horror that we know and hate is a much smaller and cleaner 176-page language wanting to get out. The book gives reasonable pointers for how that can be achieved in practice.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 13:43 GMT Tatsky
Re: It's not that difficult..
I have always instantly lost respect for anyone who immediately comes back with a response of "You can't do that" or "that's impossible". These people need a fist pump to the face.
In my 20 years of building software I have not yet come across a problem I couldn't solve. Some problems have taken weeks, but eventually there is a way. But those people who immediately say "it can't be done" just hack me off.
I always take the approach that anything is possible, given enough time and money. Sometimes the timescales or budget limit what can be achieved.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 17:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It's not that difficult..
"I always take the approach that anything is possible, given enough time and money. Sometimes the timescales or budget limit what can be achieved."
Ok Mr Amazing - go figure out how to write a low level device driver in javascript then let us know how you did it so we can all genuflect at your awesomeness.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 20:10 GMT RealFred
Then why is it I have to still use 3 different browsers to get things done. Each one has its own suckiness and bugs and websites have their own suckiness and bugs. Nothings changed or going to change, except we will still hear moaning from devs about how each browser should follow whichever standard they think is appropriate.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 13:36 GMT Nigel 11
What's changed is Microsoft no longer has upwards of 80%of the browser market. These days, if someone codes public web pages that will render right on only one browser, they will annoy a lot of (ex-) potential customers. So in general, it's now a requirement that IE (all curent versions), Firefox, Chrome and Safari are fully supported by any public-facing website.
Hopefully all the browsers will commit to supporting the official HTML5 spec, and it will then become easier to specify what you want. Shortly after, all the sensible web-creation tools will become HTML5 compliant and it will be easier to honor the spec.
I doubt that Microsoft or anyone else will find it easy to play "embrace, extend and extinguish" with the WWW in future. It would be seen as customer lock-out not customer lock-in!
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 16:19 GMT Blitheringeejit
>> So in general, it's now a requirement that IE (all curent versions), Firefox, Chrome and Safari are fully supported by any public-facing website.
Damn. I was hoping that this announcement meant that my websites only had to pass the W3C validator, and as long as they pass, I can blame any browser-specific display issues on the browser developers, and walk away whistling a merry tune.
Isn't that the point of having standards - correct allocation of blame?
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 15:02 GMT Gary Bickford
Where is the Reference Implementation?
Until there is an accepted Reference Implementation, that provides / demonstrates the 'correct' behavior for any given input, it's not really an effective standard. If necessary this implementation could be done in such a way that it would not be competitive on its own.
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Wednesday 29th October 2014 22:14 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Where is the Reference Implementation?
"the 'correct' behavior"
That's your problem, right there. Since browsers generate output for human consumption and since humans are both tolerant of variations they like and intolerant of those that they don't, there may be plenty of cases where there are either zero or multiple 'correct' behaviours rather than exactly one.
And that's before you consider what the correct behaviour might be for an output device that isn't a large, high-resolution, full-colour display.
(I might add that the IETF has historically taken the view that there should be at least two implementations of a standard and neither should be considered a "reference".)
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Sunday 15th February 2015 16:28 GMT Yorkshen
So much effort were made to produce such a bit s**t. This is another birth date for something so stupid that it is imaginable and unspeakable. HTML5 had to be just next quality enforcer on the bigest mess of text around. It was never meant to be an application platform or media platform. Those 2 misunderstanding rendered it to something which i called "THE BIGGEST MORONIC DEED WHICH WERE DONE TO THE WEB EVER!"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
