

What does HTML5 mean for us? - SlyShy
http://diveintohtml5.org/semantics.html

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techiferous
The clarity of the design and writing style of this page drew me right in. It
is incredibly refreshing to see just the content on the page and no sidebars,
topbars, ads, etc. It feels more like curling up with a book than surfing the
web!

And, of course, the content is awesome. Thanks for posting this, SlyShy!

~~~
simonw
Agree - the illustrations (all public domain, apparently) and typography
really help with that as well. Made me laugh out loud in a few places as well.

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mr_eel
This is by far the best introduction to HTML5 that I've seen. I freely admit
to being something of a sceptic about the spec — and I still seriously
question parts of it — but this introduction highlights the most important
aspect; it adds more semantics to a HTML document. I’m a big fan of that.

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fauigerzigerk
As someone making his money from failed fashions of technology history (i.e.
data integration), I welcome the idea of inventing yet another pointy
bracketed syntax for HTML 5 in the name of beauty.

We came dangerously close to removing huge amounts of nasty incompatibilities
and integration issues by converging on XML as a syntactical standard for
document formats. Now that HTML breaks away from this trend I look forward to
vendors and in-house developers inventing all kinds of crazy new money making
(for me) syntaxes!

Beauty peddlers I love you!

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brodie
What new syntax was invented here?

I can't tell if you're sarcastically lambasting HTML 5 or if you're mocking
its detractors. Could you elaborate?

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fauigerzigerk
I'm lambasting the fact that HTML 5 is neither XML nor SGML but a new pointy
bracketed surface syntax for the DOM: <http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/01/html5-is-
html-and-xml.html>

I do like other features in HTML 5 so I'm not lambasting it in general. But
it's the W3C that steers the standardization of both HTML and XML. If XML is
considered too complex or unsuitable for marking up web pages why don't they
reform XML instead of inventing yet another very similar syntax?

In my opinion the W3C has lost a lot of credibility with this move.

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brodie
It's my understanding that the "HTML" part of HTML 5 is neither new nor
invented; in fact, it's a specification of how browsers already parse HTML
documents, with the aim of normalizing that behavior among willing vendors.
Creating a realistic specification of how to handle most existing HTML on the
web seems to me like a huge step towards better integration and compatibility.

Isn't this the exact opposite of creating a new syntax? You could level your
same arguments against XML when it was introduced to browsers through XHTML.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Getting vendors to be more compatible is a laudable goal but I don't see how
it could possibly be the opposite of creating a new syntax when that's clearly
part of what they did.

XML was a grand vision to unify document formats and it sparked an entire
trend of opening up all sorts of data. It wasn't just some small incompatible
change to HTML syntax.

I don't see what it buys us to go back to an HTML specific syntax, but it
could have very broad ramifications. XML may have been overused, but if the
W3C cannot make it work for marking up web pages then XML is dead.

Removing XML from the data integration world and going back to building
parsers for every shitty DSL idea that in-house developers come up with is
going to cost the world economy dearly.

Some of that money is going to end up on my bank account, so I'm seriously
ambivalent about lambasting this historical mistake.

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RyanMcGreal
I still don't understand why the doctype for html5 is:

    
    
        <!DOCTYPE html>
    

and not

    
    
        <!DOCTYPE html5>

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MarkPilgrim
The HTML5 doctype is the shortest doctype that triggers standards mode in all
browsers.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
It sounds like HTML5 is a backwards-compatible superset that includes HTML4
and XHTML1. Does that mean the rendering engine browsers use for standards
mode is effectively an HTML5 rendering engine that also works for valid HTML4
and valid XHTML1, since they're subsets of HTML5? Or am I way off-base?

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mustpax
This a very good intro. Readable, fun and concise.

Something that caught my eye though: links now have a rel="noreferrer" option.
This sounds like a pretty bad idea. It's not supported by any browsers yet,
but if it worked it would blank out the referrer field on HTTP requests you
make after clicking on a link.

There are only two use cases I can imagine:

1\. You have some super-secret URL's that are not protected by any other
authentication method, you want to avoid others sniffing them out from the
referrer field. Verdict: your security is broken and cannot be saved by any
standards body.

2\. You're hosting a site with malicious XSS-loaded links and want to hide
your tracks. OR you are executing CSRF attacks and want to hide your tracks.
Verdict: this rel value is perfect for you.

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subwindow
A lot of forums and blogs would prefer that some sites not know that they are
talking about them. I've come across it several times and doesn't seem like
such a bad thing.

~~~
mustpax
From the vagueness of your statement, it sounds like these forums fall into
the second category of being up to no good in the first place.

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dwiel
aka: "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what've you got to hide"

~~~
bd
Not necessarily "wrong". For example, you could have an internal company wiki
which would include links to competitor's site.

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mkinsella
Very good introductory overview of HTML 5, including workarounds for IE.

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dbz
I agree. Something I might throw in for the reader is an article like:
<http://immike.net/blog/2008/02/06/xhtml-2-vs-html-5/> (I have no idea on how
credible that is; however, it seems to give some interesting information on
the matter)

so he or she understands more about the different "html"s so to speak. (But
then again, this _is_ ycombinator....)

~~~
rimantas
Forget XHTML 2: <http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item119>

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ZeroGravitas
I keep seeing people saying "I'll support it when IE10 does" or similar.

Is there a single good reason why anyone producing a website in HTML4 or XHTML
couldn't move to HTML5 today?

If you avoid the new stuff (which you couldn't use with those formats anyway)
then as far as I can tell you'd actually be using something _better_ supported
by IE6,7&8 than HTML4 and especially XHTML since a lot of HTML5 involved
reverse-engineering and minutely specifying the real-word behaviors of those
browsers so that other, more active, browser developers could more accurately
copy and interoperate.

Maybe someone needs to have a validator target called "HTML5, the IE-supported
subset".

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tolmasky
I think this subset of people you refer to doesn't actually exist in the real
world.

I doubt the people who are saying "I'll support it when IE10 does" are
referring to not closing their img tags. They're referring to all the actually
interesting features of HTML5, the ones that _actually_ have a potential of
changing the web: canvas, video tag, etc etc. Incidentally, all the features
that IE probably won't support for a very long time.

As stated before, most of these semantic changes were incorporated
specifically because they already work, so chances are people are already
using them. I doubt there's someone who is simultaneously adamant about using
XHTML 1.0 style markup AND a big fan of IE backwards compatibility.

The truth of the matter is that the part of the spec outlined in this article
reads more like a best practices sheet for "practical" HTML4 than a spec for
HTML5. By that I mean, most of it already works, and it is not likely to
significantly change the web.

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latortuga
I got about halfway through this before I decided that I just wanted to see
the final result. Perusing the source of the final link, I saw a bunch of
unclosed tags - is this something that he mentions is allowed in HTML5? I
don't think I could bring myself to place unclosed <p> or <td> elements in my
page.

As a side note I submitted this post while not logged in, was redirected to
the login page, came back to my post and instead of showing "<p>" the input
field had rendered a newline. Vulnerability of some sort?

~~~
MarkPilgrim
I've touched up the example source a bit to be closer (in style) to the
original. I may want to talk about "which tags implicitly close others" but
that's not the subject of this chapter, and having unclosed tags in the
example source is distracting from the main point.

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cakeface
"which tags implicitly close others" - stuff like this makes me cry. What is
the benefit of a format that allows such complicated rules for parsing the
document? Flexibility like this on the input is just increasing complexity of
the rendering engines and ambiguity of the resulting output.

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axod
Fantastic. Good to see all the xhtml verbose cruft going.

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rorym
Is anyone else seeing differences between the HTML5 and HTML4 example pages,
on the latest Firefox and Chrome? The article dates are in different places
and the footer is displayed in a different place.

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MarkPilgrim
This should now be fixed. Sorry for the confusion.

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alabut
One nitpick on an otherwise fabulous article - Mark links to the HTML5
enabling script in order to add IE support but I don't see any reason not to
use Modernizr instead, since you'll get CSS3 support as well.

<http://www.modernizr.com/>

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pjvandehaar
"The net result is that Internet Explorer will execute this script, but other
browsers will ignore the script altogether. This makes your page load faster
in browsers that don’t need this hack."

Though he means "faster than IE", it sounds almost as if that script will
speed up the page.

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rgr
If I were designing html5 I would have removed a bunch of redundant tags
instead of adding new ones.

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ido
Some tags were removed from html 5:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#absent-elements>

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idoh
Hey, nice to see another Ido on the site.

