
HTML 5.2 Recommendation - robin_reala
https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/
======
masswerk
Hm – I'm not too happy to see most of the original HTML-elements marked "not
conforming" and "must not be used", thus preparing for browsers to eventually
drop the support. There are still lots of web-sites and valuable information
stored and archived in this format. Back in the day, it was thought that basic
HTML was a format to last. Who is going to update these documents in order to
make them conforming to future browsers? Or are we just dropping a decade of
documentation? Is it worth it?

(Consider: Apparently, MS-Word docs or PDF prove longer lived than basic HTML
documents! Who would have thought of this?)

~~~
reificator
<blink> is no longer supported by browsers, but with a few css declarations it
works just fine.

Removing support for presentational markup does not mean a loss of
information. Browsers will still render tags they don't recognize, and re-
applying the styling of those tags is often trivial. (I mention <blink>
because it's one of the more difficult, but not terribly so)

As the web evolved, our needs changed. Do we still need the <font> tag?

~~~
orph4nus
I think you're missing the OP's point though.

It's true that you can just use some CSS to make up for the lost HTML feature,
but than again you could also rewrite the HTML part.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure that what the OP is trying to
say, is that there are plenty of great websites out there, which were
developed a long time ago, and for which there is no maintainer to do any work
on it. Thus having HTML elements like this dropped, would make the content in
a way lost.

Thinking about it some more, users can probably add plugins to add this css
automatically, or some browsers might even keep those features in, but still,
there will be users that don't know this, I think, resulting in a bad
experience.

~~~
reificator
I may not have expressed myself clearly, but I understood what OP was saying.
Never overnight and post, kids.

I was thinking about something like Stylish or the user stylesheet I've been
hearing about in Firefox (for their UI IIRC, but still). Inject some global
css on older/missing doctypes, and it's probably less than 200 total
declarations to handle every older tag. I'd imagine <font> to be the hardest
and/or longest, followed by <blink> and <marquee>.

Would be a small extension.

My other point I think I expressed clearly enough, that the loss of
presentational markup is not a loss of content in most cases. If the title is
in Times New Roman instead of Arial, most of the time it'll just look worse.
Unless the content is meta, the presentation is to make things more pleasant
to read.

~~~
unicornporn
Not sure I'm getting you… An extension to view old pages? This is the worst
idea I've heard in a long time. The web is awesome partly because it's
backwards compatible.

~~~
reificator
I'm not saying I want that, I'm saying it'd be super simple to do if things
came to that.

My primary point is that presentational markup is not required to get value
from all but the most meta of old pages.

------
taspeotis
[https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes](https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes)

~~~
rwmj
For those who have not been paying attention for a decade, what's the
relationship between this revision and WHATWG?

~~~
dmitriid
Full story here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_the_difference_between_the_w3c_and_the/ddkwft4/)

tl;dr: Ignore w3c's HTML "standards" as they are (often poor) copies of
WHATWG's standards.

~~~
wolfgke
> WHATWG's standards

I my opinion one cannot call something a "standard" that changes every few
days.

EDIT: In this sense W3C's HTML 5.x can be considered a rather badly authored
(cf. other comments here) standard, while what the WHATWG releases is not
something that even measures up to a standard, but it is the daily version of
how HTML is supposed to be today.

~~~
LaGrange
It's not enough to be stable to be a standard, you also need authority that
enforces it. Either because people "respect you" (whatever that means), or
because there's a central authority forcing them to implement the standard,
people actually implement it. If they don't, then it's not much of a standard.

So, WHATWG is in constant flux, and W3C has about as much authority as I do.
_Thankfully_ in practice WHATWG is "stable enough," but just saying that's
what "we" consider a good enough standard for something used in creating all
sorts of UIs, from trivial to vitally important, is indicative of a bigger
problem.

~~~
wolfgke
> It's not enough to be stable to be a standard, you also need authority that
> enforces it.

There exist lots of standards that hardly anybody cares about. So this is
clearly not true.

~~~
eberkund
That was his point...

------
TazeTSchnitzel
WHATWG needs to add a <w3c-please-stop-plagiarising-the-whatwg-html-standard
/> tag then gate some useful functionality behind it to see if W3C will dare
include it

------
kryptiskt
"Although we have asked them to stop doing so, the W3C also republishes some
parts of this specification as separate documents."

~~~
ChrisSD
> Copyright © 2017 WHATWG (Apple, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft). This work is
> licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

See
[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

> You are free to:

> Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

> Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even
> commercially.

~~~
oblio
I think the point here is not about the legality but more about the ethics of
doing so, in this case.

~~~
ChrisSD
It just amuses me that they're effectively saying that anyone can fork this
for any reason... except for the W3C.

~~~
dragonwriter
No, they are saying anyone _is allowed to_ fork this for any reason, but we’d
_really prefer_ the W3C didn't fork this for the reason that they are, because
it's confusing and counterproductive.

Whether someone should be _permitted_ to do something is a different issue
than whether they should actually do it.

------
dmitriid
Yeah. Only it's possibly WHATWG's proposal. Copied over with names changed and
multiple errors here and there.

See the full story here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_the_difference_between_the_w3c_and_the/ddkwft4/)

------
bringtheaction
Wasn't HTML 5 supposed to be the last explicit version and then it would be a
living standard without changing the version number?

~~~
currysausage
"HTML", not "HTML 5", yes:
[https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/)

The W3C regularly publishes forks [1] of the WHATWG HTML Living Standard. They
have good SEO, but not much relevance.

[1] [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
archive/2014Apr/0034...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-
archive/2014Apr/0034.html)

------
exabrial
I really wish we'd "simplify" the HTML spec. The "pave the cow paths" approach
to allow non-closed tags and mix of various syntaxes has lead to an explosion
of complexity. That has regressed into terrible performance and memory hungry
parsers.

~~~
rhencke
This was done once - it was called XHTML. It was, effectively, just HTML in
XML form. Tags had a single syntax (no implicitly self-closing tags).
Documents were required to be well-formed, syntactically, or they would not
display.

It did not win.

~~~
dragonwriter
It also didn't lose, since WHATWG HTML retains an XML syntax (no longer
_formally called_ XHTML, But it's the evolution of the same thing.)

There are still use cases for the XML syntax.

------
andrewmcwatters
I wish WHATWG would properly version their work. I don't like the idea of a
"living standard" because it leads to checking for individual functionality
and feature detection, rather than being able to say, "This is fully HTML
5.x.x compliant."

Regardless of the state of W3C, if I built an embedded renderer based on their
specs, I could at least say, "this renderer is based on <http-ref> and link to
the recommended spec version. Whereas if I did that with the living standard
href, I'd be out of date any time they decided to rename an attribute.

~~~
geofft
But that's the point - web authors are _supposed_ to use feature detection
instead of writing to a particular standard version. It turns out to be a
better model for large interfaces. Yes, in theory, you can ask "Is this OS
POSIX.1-2008-compliant or not." In practice, it takes a while to e _fully_
POSIX.1-2008-compliant, and so you get autoconf, with its individual feature
detections of specific function. Less clean, but way more practical.

If you're writing an embedded renderer, you can always say "This is compliant
with the standard as of 14 December 2017." If you're writing an embedded
renderer that is being applied to the live web and not just to a fixed set of
pages that are also embedded (e.g., you're shipping HTML documentation and a
viewer, or a kiosk, or something), you will in fact be out-of-date when the
living standard changes. There's no point in saying "I'm compatible with HTML
5.2.0" because the live web isn't targeting 5.2 any more. So you can either
acknowledge that, or figure out how to get software updates.

~~~
colanderman
How does one perform feature detection in a static HTML page?

As far as I can tell the only way to author a compatible web page these days
is by checking every damn feature of HTML you use against some humongous table
like Can I Use? before assuming your audiences' browsers support it.

Compare to versioned specs, where I need simply determine the minimum spec
version supported by my target audience (and any exceptions to the spec) and
code against that spec.

There is some utility in naming sets of well-supported features...

~~~
andrewmcwatters
This is the annoying part. It's a joke that a site like Can I Use needs to
exist, and that browser vendors don't really have apt versions of their own
compatibility tables.

Going to a third-party website to check to see if something is supported is
disgusting.

~~~
reificator
I'm quite happy with the various vendor pages, including internet
explorer/edge.

But since I'm not developing for a single browser (outside of my day job that
is) I'm going to use the aggregate site that shows all of them at once.

------
_nalply
_This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it
should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read
backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections
from the contents list and following all the cross-references._

Ah, hyperbole. I didn't know that humor could be specified.

~~~
philipwhiuk
<link rel="humour" type="text/hyperbole" href="w3cHumour.hss" />

------
zaarn
For the lazy and/or those unable find the link in the massively oversized
index; [0] Changes listed here

[0]:
[https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes](https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes)

~~~
itsbits
thght noreferrer value was already a standard.

~~~
detaro
It is. W3C HTML5 standards are merely following/copying what WHATWG and the
browser makers are doing, with little actual relevance.

~~~
pjmlp
The relevance it that W3C HTML5 standards are supposed to already be stable
everywhere, while WHATWG and the browser is a guessing game of what actually
works and behaves the same way everywhere.

~~~
detaro
I've never seen anyone reference it in that way, which doesn't mean nobody
does, but was the basis for my wording of "little actual relevance".
(Admittedly, going to either HTML spec is not something that's needed very
often for most devs, since most changes happen in other specs (CSS, web
platform APIs at W3C, ...) and/or are widely documented outside, but while
I've had occasional discussions involving quotes from the WHATWG spec, W3C
HTML5 spec hasn't been referenced at all)

For the question "is this supported widely enough", caniuse.com + your local
traffic stats is in most cases more relevant than inclusion in some spec or
not.

------
tobyhinloopen
what's with the separation of w3c & whatwg? Are there now 2 HTML5-ish
standards? Also, I thought HTML5 was going to be the "final version"

------
magnat
What's the point of removing features such as "menu" from HTML standard? If
there are browsers supporting it and webpages using it, would Mozilla (or
Google or Microsoft) actually remove those features just because newest
standard said so? I mean: marquee was deprecated long ago, yet browsers still
render it correctly.

~~~
geofft
<isindex> got removed from browsers, which I personally find kind of sad
because that's what I learned in 1995 and I've written a web page that uses
it. But it's weird and does nothing that a normal form couldn't do, so the
browsers seem to want to deprecate it.

~~~
domenicd
The biggest weirdness about it was that it was essentially a parser macro, not
an element. That is, at parse time, it expanded into a form/label/hr/input set
of elements into the token stream. Super-bizzare. See the removal patch at
[https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec7...](https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/5c44abc734eb483f9a7ec79da5844d2fe63d9c3b).

------
yuhong
I already have suggested to base the W3C snapshots on the WHATWG web developer
edition.

------
tebruno99
here is an idea, how about the w3 go to hell after selling us out on DRM.

------
jlebrech
nope, html needs to stop.

it's a document markup language and shouldn't be used for apps.

~~~
eberkund
What about XAML and all the other XML based UI markups? I find HTML
refreshingly easy to use compared to the alternatives.

~~~
jlebrech
XUL seemed interesting, not being backwards compatible with html was one of
it's strengths.

