Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Design principles for HTML 5
W3C has published its first working draft of HTML Design Principles, which describes "the set of guiding principles used by the HTML Working Group for the development of HTML5." They're looking for input. Subheads like "Do Not Reinvent the Wheel," "Pave the Cowpaths," and "Avoid Needless Complexity" suggest that the current aim is not to wander too far from existing HTML practices. XHTML is mentioned only once, in reference to a namespace; if merging HTML and XHTML is a goal, it isn't mentioned here.
What bothers me most is that the document doesn't say anything about why there should be an HTML 5 at all. What's the point without a specified goal?
Labels: HTML
# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:19 AM 
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> XHTML is mentioned only once, in reference to a namespace; if merging HTML and XHTML is a goal, it isn't mentioned here.
It's not a goal. It's not even possible without changing XML, and changing XML is way out of scope for the HTML WG. It is however a goal that HTML and XHTML should be as similar as possible, and that's covered under "3.5. DOM Consistency".
> What bothers me most is that the document doesn't say anything about why there should be an HTML 5 at all.
You're right it doesn't, but I'm not sure that's something that should be put in a design principles document. Perhaps the charter or the vision document should contain that information, but I'm not sure they do.
In any case, there should be an HTML5 in order to:
* Specify how existing text/html documents are to be parsed and processed, so that a browser can be created from scratch in the future when the source code of concurrent browsers are lost and the world has moved on to some other format. Implementing a browser based on the SGML, HTML4 and DOM specs will *not* result in a browser that can render most of the Web, because they don't reflect the Web.
* Increase interoperability between browsers so that authors don't have to use hacks or workarounds for things to work as intended cross-browser, without having browser vendors being forced to reverse engineer each other.
* Have browser vendors come together and discuss things they want to implement (like video), instead of having browser vendors implement new stuff in incompatible ways (like in the IE4/NS4 era).
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It's not a goal. It's not even possible without changing XML, and changing XML is way out of scope for the HTML WG. It is however a goal that HTML and XHTML should be as similar as possible, and that's covered under "3.5. DOM Consistency".
> What bothers me most is that the document doesn't say anything about why there should be an HTML 5 at all.
You're right it doesn't, but I'm not sure that's something that should be put in a design principles document. Perhaps the charter or the vision document should contain that information, but I'm not sure they do.
In any case, there should be an HTML5 in order to:
* Specify how existing text/html documents are to be parsed and processed, so that a browser can be created from scratch in the future when the source code of concurrent browsers are lost and the world has moved on to some other format. Implementing a browser based on the SGML, HTML4 and DOM specs will *not* result in a browser that can render most of the Web, because they don't reflect the Web.
* Increase interoperability between browsers so that authors don't have to use hacks or workarounds for things to work as intended cross-browser, without having browser vendors being forced to reverse engineer each other.
* Have browser vendors come together and discuss things they want to implement (like video), instead of having browser vendors implement new stuff in incompatible ways (like in the IE4/NS4 era).
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