Thoughts on the lastest HTML 5 specification

[jeffman]

I feel like a conversation, not a poll. Just wondering how everyone is taking the newest spec. I for one am looking forward to:Editable content. More flexibility than textareas, I hope. Should facilitate collaborative texts. I've been working on this using existing methods, and MAN what a pain.The canvas. I can already draw at download time using GD, but the spec seems to allow realtime user drawing. Yeah, fun for the Hannah Montana crowd, but here too I imagine collaborative stuff, like sharing flowcharts, commenting on prototypes, blueprints, etc.Drag and Drop for everybody. A no-brainer if you do webapps. You can Walter Zorn or DIY now, but when you drag a div with a bunch of elements (say, a pseudo dialog), a few elements always lag behind and spoil the illusion, the dragging can jerk, etc. Once the functionality is compiled, it should move fast. That's my hope.DataGrid. It is such a pain to spreadsheet using 4.01, CSS, and the DOM. Too many elements and it breaks or gets horribly slow.IN SHORT I'm looking forward to things I can half-do now with funky workarounds.Comments?

[Ingolme]

Hmm, i'm fine with the current HTML. The <canvas> element seems pretty useful. Drag and drop is pretty useful for web applications. Though I never had a lot of trouble doing it with Javascript before.The <video> and <audio> elements seem useful too.And all the elements that define the layout of the page are good.But I don't think we'll be using HTML 5 for another 2 or 3 years.

[jeffman]

But I don't think we'll be using HTML 5 for another 2 or 3 years.

I figure we'll go through another "Best viewed on . . ." stage while Firefox or somebody steps ahead of the crowd and IE plays catch-up. At least this time, "best viewed on" will mean "most compliant" instead of "most proprietary."But that doesn't mean we can't get ready to play. I think there's also an opportunity for designers who want to be ready for the day/epoch when the new spec IS widely used.

[aspnetguy]

I hate to be the pesimistic one but with IE8 still in beta and, finally, promising CSS 2.1 support I can't see HTML5 being useful for many many years. Yes we can play around with it just like people do with canvas but when it comes to real world websites and applications that stuff is useless because IE doesn't support it. CSS 2 was introduced in 1998 (10 years ago) and CSS 2.1 in 2002. That is a long time to implement a standard.Unless IE continues it's, seemingly, change to faster releases then it could be another 5-10 years before HTML5 is ready for prime time.

[Ingolme]

I just remembered something. Reading the draft for HTML 5 I realised the innerHTML property is actually a W3C standard now.At the moment it's not recommended by the W3C, that's why I avoid it when possible.

[jeffman]

I just remembered something. Reading the draft for HTML 5 I realised the innerHTML property is actually a W3C standard now. At the moment it's not recommended by the W3C, that's why I avoid it when possible.

I have been telling you that for weeks!

[Ingolme]

Either way, I prefer DOM methods. From what I heard, in XHTML 2.0, HTML written with innerHTML would be display as text. That was a long time ago, though, when it seemed that XHTML 2.0 was going to be implemented in browsers in the future.It never was, so I'll have to go with HTML 5.At the moment I still prefer to avoid innerHTML.

[justsomeguy]

From what I heard, in XHTML 2.0, HTML written with innerHTML would be display as text.

That would be pretty stupid. It's not called innerTEXT.

[Ingolme]

Well, I actually would have to go research that again. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, it might be the document.write() statement they were talking about that returns HTML as strings.

[boen_robot]

I really don't like HTML 5, and the whole idea behind it. I especially don't like the way the WHATWG takes into account accessibility, i.e. barely if at all. I mean.... drag&drop?!?!I was really hoping XHTML 2.0 would keep going forward, as it seemed to be what HTML should've been from the start. I just love the idea of "src" being a universal attribute with the contents of an element being an alternative. I've wanted that ever since my first image on a web page experience (i.e. a ritcher fallback, like with <object/>). Not to mention XForms being a core part of it.I guess XForms is pretty much the reason why development was frozen. There are not enough implementations of it in browsers yet, and browser vendors don't want to keep working on a difficult to implement draft for which users will expect an implementation soon.But I guess it's partly the XHTML WG's and XML WG's fault too. If only XHTML was designed to use a Schema instead of a DTD, and I mean a Schema that allows namespaces, or if XML DTDs were made namespace aware from day one, then XHTML and XForms could be really separated, while still keeping valid code and original DTDs. Then, implementers would've been less reserved over what to support and what not (imagine a cross browser XForms plug-in that parses such valid markup).