

How HTML5 came into existence. - AndrewDucker
http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

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gregory80
this is an absolutely wonderful read. I stumbled across it about a week ago.
Every web developer should at least peruse it.

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hardik988
It's always fascinating to read up about the history of languages. Another
fascinating story is about how Javascript came into existence - it's a video
by Douglas Crockford. <http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111593/1710507>

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ericflo
It's a joy to read just about anything that Mark Pilgrim writes.

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lwhi
A while back I spent some time following some of the W3 lists relating to web
fonts. It amazed me just how open the process is .. any interested party can
offer a view and attempt to influence the process.

To me, someone new to the process, it seemed that this arrangement was very
democratic - and I was surprised that there weren't more people involved in
the discussion, when so many millions of developers are set to be affected by
the decisions that are made.

I was also left wondering if I'd have as much optimism and enthusiasm if I
tried to become involved in traditional government politics ...

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lisper
My favorite quote: "The ones that win are the ones that ship."

Word.

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alsomike
Reading this, it occurs to me that designers probably had little to no input
into the creation of HTML and CSS. In other words, everyone struggles with
this format today because the creators didn't pay attention to a group of
users that would turn out to be very large. I guess hindsight is 20/20.

There are many drivers towards HTML5/CSS3, but at least one of them is meeting
the needs of designers, so obviously this is in the process of being
corrected. Like most people, I've been pretty anti-IE, but someone pointed out
to me that HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft
implemented years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity,
etc. Vector graphics? Microsoft: VML in IE5, 1999. Mozilla: SVG in Firefox
1.5, 2005.

Maybe if open source and standards-based browser developers had taken the lead
in supporting designers' needs, they could have overtaken IE years ago.

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pornel
> HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft implemented
> years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity, etc

Embeddable fonts are CSS, which is orhogonal to HTML5. Shadows and gradients
are in <canvas> 2D context, but the well-known ones are also CSS properties,
not HTML5.

SVG is based on VML. Microsoft proposed it to W3C (<http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-
VML>), and W3C developed it further until it became SVG.

Microsoft's shadows, gradients and opactiy were based on DirectX filters with
own horrible syntax, that didn't even tokenize according to CSS syntax. It
couldn't be accepted in original form. Current syntax has been mostly invented
by Apple (but gradients have been deemed too ugly as well, and spec went with
Mozilla's syntax).

Microsoft's APIs may have been first, but they're not pretty. PPK calls IE-
derived drag'n'drop API a "fucking disaster":
[http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_dr...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_drag.html)

Sadly, lots of Microsoft's and Netscape's Browser War-era inventions are in
HTML5 only because lots/high-profile websites rely on them.

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alsomike
I'm not saying they did a good job, implementation wise. But isn't it a shame
that I have to thank Microsoft for helping out designers instead of the
browser standards people?

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olavk
Well CSS was invented by "browser standards people" to make design easier and
more powerful. (Blame browser bugs and incompatibilities for making them more
difficult than necessary to use.)

Microsofts inventions (Ajax, drag-drop, contentEditable) were more targeted
towards application development than design.

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alsomike
Maybe you're misunderstanding - many of the new CSS3 properties that make life
easier for designers implement features that IE has had since IE6 and even
earlier. Standards-compliant browser developers are only catching up now.

