

What’s Wrong with “HTML5″ - knowtheory
http://yehudakatz.com/2010/10/07/whats-wrong-with-html5/

======
terra_t
I think it's harmless, and it crystalizes the idea that things are changing,
the same way that the term "Web 2.0" did.

Muggles have a lot of trouble with names. I worked for a big Uni back in the
age when Mozilla's browser was caled "Mozilla" and it was impossible to get
anybody to take Mozilla seriously. This was a place full of Unix-heads and
Microsoft-haters, and we found that in 2002 we still had a 30% market share on
campus of the despicable Netscape 4 browser.

When "Firefox" came out, all of a sudden the muggles realized there was an
alternative to IE, so Netscape 4 finally died for us.

The project to obliterate flash and replace it with something open needs a
name... And "HTML 5" is as good as any, inprecise as it is.

~~~
knowtheory
Yehuda's point is actually that HTML5 is NOT like Web2.0. Everybody knew that
Web2.0 wasn't a _thing_. Now there are people confusing HTML5 as a thing with
the process of making the web better.

~~~
terra_t
People regularly convert verbs into nouns. It's a semantic error, but it makes
the invisible process of "making the web better" visible to the muggles.

~~~
knowtheory
verbing nouns does indeed weird language, but that's not the point here.

The point that analysis of HTML5 as a standard is not the point of the current
effort to improve the web, and improve computing in general.

It does not matter where HTML5 and Flash happen to stand at the moment in
aggregate usage across companies. Who cares. There are many reasons for
adoption of each technology, dependent on the circumstance of each company and
their business models.

That's why HTML5 as a noun is a bad banner, avatar, symbol, whatever. Web2.0,
nebulous as it may have been, could not be confused with an actual object.

HTML5 suffers the same problem that XML did. People thought anything that
touched XML was going to be the wave of the future, and improve everyone's
lives, and be both machine and human readable, and lead to a revolution in how
metadata was transported.

It is true that XML lead to cool new capabilities on the web. It also was not
a panacea, nor did it instantly make any project that used it awesome (XML
config files are one of the most heinous digital inventions ever).

People should not confuse the _movement_ to create better web technologies,
with the web technologies themselves, or we will all miss the point.

------
mechanical_fish
We need to hope that Tim O'Reilly can invent a better term.

I'm quite serious. "Web 2.0" may have been an amorphously defined grab-bag of
a concept, and some people didn't like it, but at least it didn't get itself
confused with a W3C standards document. If you call something "Web 2.0
compliant" people tend to recognize that you are kidding.

~~~
ceejayoz
Most of the people I've heard say "Web 2.0 compliant" aren't kidding.

~~~
mechanical_fish
When composing my original sentence, I chose the word _tend_ very carefully.
;)

------
olalonde
I genuinely don't get the author's arguments.

 _Unfortunately, the term, and therefore the way the technology is understood
by tech writers, is causing some fairly serious problems._

 _The thing is, the core problem isn’t that the name is too fuzzy. It’s what
the name implies._

 _The truth is, the “completion” of HTML5 is absolutely irrelevant._

Basically, the tech press shouldn't use the term HTML5 because they don't
understand it? HTML5 is a major milestone for the web and the term carries
much more meaning than previous buzzwords (AJAX, Web 2.0, DHTML, etc.). HTML5
is a new technology unlike AJAX or DHTML which defined new ways of using
existing technologies (AJAX = Javascript + XMLHttpRequest API, DHTML = HTML +
Javascript DOM manipulation). Unlike those terms, HTML5 is very well defined
and therefore quite hard to misuse. Am I missing something?

~~~
daleharvey
your confusion is exactly what the article was about

html5 is not a milestone, its a progression, it will never be finished and it
started a long long time ago.

~~~
kenjackson
I must admit, I'm confused. I will never be finished? Isn't it just a
specification? Isn't there some time when they say the spec is done and signed
off on by the appropriate standards bodies?

~~~
steveklabnik
Actually, after the first version of the spec is finalized... html will be
versionless. Hence `<!doctype html>`.

~~~
olalonde
I wasn't aware of that. Won't it be living hell for web developers trying to
build cross-browser compatible websites? Will you have to perpetually keep
track of the implementation status of every HTML5 features for every browser
in addition to keeping track of every browser version and their market share?

Edit: I wasn't referring to the DOCTYPE. I was referring to the fact that up
until now you could just assume it was safe to use HTML 4.01 because you knew
it was implemented (almost) consistently across a large share of browsers out
there. Now you will have to keep track of features individually instead of
keeping track of a discrete set of features AKA a HTML version.

~~~
FooBarWidget
The doctype has never been useful for detecting browser features. You needed,
and still need to, do that with user agent sniffing or with Javascript. All
the doctype has ever been useful for is for controlling the browser rendering
mode, i.e. standards compliant mode or quirks mode. HTML5 defines much more
precisely how pages should be rendered, including how to render broken HTML
pages, thereby obsoleting a thing like quirks mode.

------
adam_albrecht
I actually think it's great that the term has caught on. If people were to
talk about "next update to the W3C standard" or about the features
individually, it wouldn't be getting nearly as much press as it does. And with
the increased press comes increased pressure on the browsers (I'm looking at
you, IE!) to actually support the new standards.

------
msie
Well, I think it's too bad that HTML5 can't be treated like a milestone.
Worrying about what will be officially recommended, what is or isn't part of
HTML5 (geolocation API apparently) really puts me off thinking about
developing for it.

~~~
wycats
You should be worried about what features have enough browser adoption in your
target market to enable their use, not whether the W3C has marked a large
group of loosely related technologies "done".

------
robotron
I agree, "HTML5" is a stupid name for what it's being used for... but what is
the tech press supposed to call the loose bundle of browser technologies?
They're going to call it something chosen by the path of least resistance.

------
rryyan
It sounds like we need a nice, harmless, amorphous name like "Web 2.0" that
the press can use to describe the new wave of next-generation websites.

How about: "Web 3.0"

~~~
nkassis
I think HTML Xtreme would do fine.

