Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Jumping the gun on HTML 5
With the release of Firefox 3.5, references to the "HTML 5 standard" are on the rise in tech news. CNET refers to "new standards such as HTML 5." The Christian Science Monitor says "this latest version [of Firefox] adds support for the HTML 5 web standard." BNET Technology has a whole article on HTML 5 without once suggesting that it isn't in final form.
But as the World Wide Web Consortium notes, HTML 5 is still a long way from being settled. The latest working draft states: "Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways." (Emphasis in the original.)
This most likely means that there will be several different "HTML 5"s from different vendors, and that it will be a long time before they all come close to agreement. HTML 5 was intended to close the gap among different implementations by specifying more aspects of the language and basing it on an object model rather than a syntactic one, but we're probably in for more of the same techno-Babel.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
W3C rescinds four drafts
This is unusual; W3C has rescinded four XHTML-related drafts. This means that they roll back to the previous versions. The rescinded drafts are:
- XHTML™ 1.1 - Module-based XHTML - Second Edition
- XHTML™ Basic 1.1 - Second Edition
- XHTML-Print - Second Edition
- XHTML™ 1.0
Friday, April 24, 2009
HTML 5 update
W3C has published new working drafts of:
- HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML
- HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4
- The Web Sockets API
- Server-sent Events
- Web Storage
- Web Workers
The last four are newly broken out from the HTML 5 specification. Or should we call it Ginormica?
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Guide to HTML 5
The Web Developer's Guide to HTML 5 is available as an Editor's Draft on the W3C website.
There are some annoying discrepancies between HTML 4 and XHTML, at least formally. For example, say you want to insert a <br> tag into a page. In HTML, strictly following the rules, you have to leave the tag unmatched. The trailing-slash construct of XML isn't allowed in HTML, and an explicit closing tag is strictly speaking not permitted either. In XHTML, of course, you must close the tag, either using <br/> or <br></br> This meant you couldn't use the same markup for HTML and XHTML. In practice this really isn't an issue, since just about all current browsers do allow the trailing slash for HTML, but it's still an annoyance for strict validation. HTML 5, however, allows the trailing slash, so HTML and XHTML can use the same markup for line breaks.
The article says: "Both the HTML and XHTML syntax appear similar and it is possible to mark up documents using a common subset of of the syntax that is the same in both, while avoiding the syntactic sugar that is unique to each." Perhaps this is really true, or close to it.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published a DCMI recommendation on "Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements". This provides a standardized way to embed metadata on a single work in a web page.
Monday, June 16, 2008
XHTML for small devices
W3C has issued two proposed recommendations related to XHTML for mobile phones, PDAs, and other limited devices.
- XHTML Basic 1.1 is "designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes."
- XHTML Modularization "provides a means for subsetting and extending XHTML, a feature needed for extending XHTML's reach onto emerging platforms."
New publications on HTML 5
On June 10, W3C issued three new documents related to HTML 5:
- HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. This is the latest (but still in flux) draft of the HTML 5 spec.
- HTML 5 Publication Notes. This covers changes since January to the draft specification.
- HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4. It's not as long as I expected it to be, but the changes are still major.
Friday, June 06, 2008
The HTML 5 monster
Till recently, I haven't paid much attention to HTML 5, but I've started to notice that it looks like a disastrous exercise in bloating. Justin James's recent comments give some clues about where it's going far beyond a markup language.
For instance, HTML 5 contains a number of API's, including support for SQL. What makes this possible is that DOM, not the text markup, is the heart of the new HTML definition. Implementations of HTML 5 "must support some version of DOM Core and DOM Events." Required support for events seems to imply required support for scripting, but elsewhere the document says: "Implementations that do not support scripting (or which have their scripting features disabled) are exempt from supporting the events and DOM interfaces mentioned in this specification. For the parts of this specification that are defined in terms of an events model or in terms of the DOM, such user agents must still act as if events and the DOM were supported." I don't know what "acting as if" they were supported means.
This truly boggles me: "Conformance checkers must check that the input document conforms when scripting is disabled, and should also check that the input document conforms when scripting is enabled. (This is only a 'SHOULD' and not a 'MUST' requirement because it has been proven to be impossible. [HALTINGPROBLEM])" As a consequence of defining events into the language, in the general case HTML 5 documents can't be validated!
The working draft says, "The main area that has not been adequately addressed by HTML is a vague subject referred to as Web Applications." There is a good point to this, but the question is what HTML's role should be in supporting web applications. It should provide a tag framework which applications can use in an extensible way. It shouldn't define specific technologies into the language or require their support.
HTML 5 looks as if it will end up horribly bloated. This doesn't bode well for browser security.
Labels: HTML
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
HTML 5 draft
W3C has published an early working draft for HTML 5. It warns readers: "Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways." This is expanded with lots of warnings and notations in bright red boxes.
Let the arguments begin!
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Preview of HTML 5
Lachlan Hunt offers a preview of HTML 5. The article mentions three main issues: more specific tags to use in place of DIV and SPAN, native support for audio and visual media, and the use of DOM as the foundation rather than an afterthought.
Labels: HTML
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
Monday, October 22, 2007
W3C roundup
There are a bunch of new working drafts from W3C:
- Selectors API (used with CSS)
- Behavioral extensions to CSS
- CSS snapshot 2007 (collects "all the specs that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets")
- CSS Mobile Profile 2.0
- RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing
- Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap)
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
W3C Technical Plenary Week
W3C will be holding its Technical/Plenary Week at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge from November 5 to November 10.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
User Friendly HTML
User Friendly looks at HTML 5.
It's not exactly today's news, of course. Here's a link to the main page of the W3C HTML Working Group.
Labels: HTML
Friday, July 20, 2007
WICD good
W3C has announced four related candidate recommendations for compound documents. These cover the Compound Document by Reference Framework (CDRF) and the Web Integration Compound Document (WICD, pronounced "Wicked"). The candidate recommendations are:
CSS 2.1
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
XHTML Basic 1.1
XHTML Basic 1.1, a subset of XHTML for handheld devices, settop boxes, phones, etc., is now a W3C candidate recommendation.
Friday, June 29, 2007
JHOVE performance note
Recently I noticed, in response to a user complaint about slow performance, that you can get huge performance improvements in JHOVE by disabling the HTML module in your configuration file. Because HTML is defined in such a way that a text file might be a valid HTML file if it just has a TITLE tag somewhere in it, it's necessary to parse the whole file before dismissing it, and this is painfully slow for multi-megabyte files.
If HTML files are in the mix of files you're analyzing, this may not be an option. In this case, you can still get a speed improvement by moving the HTML module lower in the config file (but still before ASCII and UTF-8), so that well-formed files of other formats won't incur the HTML module's overhead.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
RDFa
W3C has released a primer for RDFa, a working draft specification for embedding RDF metadata in HTML or XHTML. The examples show how it can be used with <span> tags and attributes to mark up data in line, so it isn't necessary to enter the same information as readable text and again as metadata.
This sounds very useful, and I want to play with it on my book review pages to make bibliographic information extractable. Of course, to be particularly useful, there will have to be extraction software, and it will be developed only if enough sites use RDFa metadata to make it worthwhile. Probably spambots will be the first to take advantage of it, unfortunately.
There's an experimental extractor available here. It spits out Python errors when used on HTML that isn't well-formed, but some people have managed to use it.
XML.com has an introduction to RDFa.
