
The Fundamentals, Primitives and History of HTML5 - DanielRibeiro
http://paulirish.com/2011/primitives-html5-video/
======
gambler
Allowing to omit closing tags is a bad idea. It doesn't add to clarity. In
fact, it makes _complex_ HTML much harder to read. And if you want to write
your own simple parser - good luck dealing with all those special cases. Where
is the benefit?

If you want minimalism, true minimalism, you should come up with a simpler
model, rather than introducing a myriad of special cases to an already
complicated model.

------
rufibarbatus
If CSS selector behaviour and the DOM elude you— _especially_ if you use them
in production and they still elude you—this is a must watch: it's relatively
short[1], no nonsense, and though not definitive, it's a nice way to get up to
speed with what's behind HTML5 and why all the buzz.

[1]: Definitely shorter than what I'd suggest as an alternative—Mark Pilgrim's
history of HTML5
<[http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html>](http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html>).

(PS - @DanielRibeiro: what a small world, a friend of mine works at the
company you used to be CTO of!)

~~~
scott_s
Small note: wrapping URLs in <> confuses the URL parser.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
More precisely, the url is:

<http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html>

PS @rufibarbatus : It sure is! I still keep in touch with them (some of them
are here on hacker news: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3192719>)

------
jedschmidt
I loved this presentation. But just out of curiosity, why aren't these
techniques (not closing tags or quoting attributes) used in HTML5 Boilerplate?

------
fantata
This is awesome. I love the minified markup. To think what I could have been
doing with all the time I've spent closing tags and quoting attributes.

~~~
pamelafox
Beware: The browser may handle unclosed tags just fine, but many times your
markup goes through a library first, and libraries vary in their support. For
example, I found I had to close my tags when writing HTML in jQuery templates,
and I found a bug in Zepto the other day with creating HTML from a string
containing multiple self-closing tags (a similar practice).

After being bit those few times, I've gone back to closing all my tags (even
when the w3 spec says unclosed is more correct). If I'm going to have to do it
sometimes, I'd rather be consistent and do it all the time.

------
WildUtah
How much of this stuff will doom you if any of your users are still stuck on
IE? (unclosed tags, new more concise doctypes, simpler document structure,
utf8 element values and text, other cool HTML5 standard markup)

Is this a preview of the web we might be able to write in fifteen years when
Microsoft allows us to catch up?

~~~
yonran
If your question is whether HTML5 is backward-compatible with IE6, then the
answer is yes (as much as possible). It should be noted that much of the
parsing complexity and looser validation are simply observations from IE6's
behavior. The new elements and attributes are mostly just ignored in IE6
(article, input type=url, etc.) As for unclosed tags and unquoted attributes,
they have been around since HTML 1.0[1], so I don't think you can blame HTML5
for introducing them.

[1]:
[http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/M...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html)

