

Get Ready for HTML 5 - whalesalad
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/get-ready-for-html-5/

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mtrichardson
"If you are like most designers, you probably don’t write all your markup by
hand."

...really?

~~~
electronslave
Years ago, I called BS on that too, but the ALA convention of "by hand" means
"we're not writing flat files full of markup anymore." And we aren't. We use
templates now.

~~~
jacobolus
The implication in the article was that people were using pre-written code
that didn't include 'HTML 5 features', so now they'll have to write the code
'by hand' instead. So at least in this case, the usage is different from what
you're calling 'ALA convention'.

~~~
electronslave
Er, I'm seeing that phrase the way I described it, and as it was described to
me.

"If you are like most designers, you probably don’t write all your markup by
hand. But until the tools you use catch up to the new elements in (X)HTML 5,
you will be doing some markup by hand while you learn."

Mind you, that speaks to templates like WordPress layouts, Django plugins,
Rails gems that generate their own markup, Drupal modules. The list goes on.

What did you have in mind?

~~~
callmeed
To me, he's talking about wysiwyg tools like Dreamweaver.

~~~
electronslave
Okay, that's fine. And yes, he might be. My take on it was the following
narrative:

"hey, ALA reader #21223, there's no Drupal modules that use HTML5 features."

 _(hand on cheek)_ "oh crap, I overcommitted!"

"you certainly did. that'll teach you to read oreilly's blog. wait until that
module gets written, or write your own."

 _(reinserting finger into nose)_ "phew, now I can return to complacency."

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samps
"I suggest that you write your markup in XHTML 5..."

Is this really as settled as the author makes it sound? I can't see any
particular advantages to living in XMLland.

~~~
seldo
He even mentions the biggest reason not to do so, which is that any typos in
XHTML (when served as XML) will result in the yellow-and-red screen of death
in Firefox.

The failure case for XML on even a single typo being the total destruction of
your web app is unacceptable. This is why at Yahoo, we're pretty firm about
using plain HTML, from yahoo.com on down.

Being a purist about markup is great and all, but the robustness of browsers
when given accidentally broken markup is one of the great strengths of the
web. Serving as XML makes your apps less stable.

~~~
electronslave
_a single typo [is] the total destruction of your web app_

Really? I mean, I know why my company's pages don't validate. I'm more than
ready to execute a putsch to take care of that problem.

So why doesn't Yahoo, in its vastness of being, have the ability to clear
pages through (automatable, standardized and fairly simplistic) validation? Is
it a 5-bytes-on-the-wire savings problem like at Google? Or just PEBCAK as is
par for the course?

~~~
DanHulton
PEBKAC, actually.

Though it can be (sort of) argued that regular HTML files that don't validate
are just as destructive to user experience as XHTML ones. If your file doesn't
validate, the browser has to discard it's "pure" parsing mode and start again
in quirks mode, which can really slow it down.

I don't have the figures to hand, but there have been some neat studies done
that show that changing a website so that it validates appreciably increased
conversions.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
That's not true.

The browser doesn't validate the content and neither knows nor cares if it
would. It does something called _doctype sniffing_ to choose whether it goes
into one of a few different modes based entirely on the declaration (or lack
of the same) at the top of the document.

 _"However, it is important to realize that the Quirks mode vs. Standards mode
is predominantly about CSS layout and parsing—not HTML parsing. Some people
misleadingly refer to the Standards mode as “strict parsing mode”, which is
misunderstood to imply that browsers enforced HTML syntax rules and that a
browser could be used to assess the correctness of markup. This is not the
case. The browsers do tag soup fix-ups even when the Standards mode layout is
in effect. (In 2000 before Netscape 6 was released, Mozilla actually had
parser modes that enforced HTML syntax rules. These modes were incompatible
with existing Web content and were abandoned.)"_

Quoted from (and _far_ more details) here: <http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>

