ratbeard 's Bookmarks tagged standards →  View Popular

In case the comment gets lost:

#

> standards are only a solution to some degree

They would be more of a solution if Microsoft were actively participating in the development of HTML 5. Yes, I know Chris is the co-chair. Go count the number of posts he’s made to either the WHATWG list or the W3C HTML Working Group list. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Oh look, here’s Chris 8 days after joining the group: Versioning and html[5]. It was rightly met with strong opposition and never made it into the spec.

And then… nothing. For months. A few administrative bits about teleconferences, a promise for a thorough spec review that never came, a one-liner here or there about accessibility, and then… nothing.

And then… IE8! Which, shocker of shockers, implements EXACTLY THE KIND OF FRAGMENT-THE-WEB VERSIONING SCHEME that the working group shot down last April. Apparently, they spent 7 months figuring out how to route around the HTML working group, and finally settled on using existing de facto extensibility mechanisms like an X- HTTP header and a META tag. And, apparently, getting some friendly stooges like Zeldman to launder it through A List Apart.

Let me make this clear: this is Microsoft’s SOLE CONTRIBUTION to the ongoing HTML 5 standards process. You can read the mailing list archives yourself if you don’t believe me. They completely ignored it for YEARS while it was still a loose federation of rabble-rousers at whatwg.org, then got “invited” to co-chair when the whole thing got subsumed into the W3C. And the FIRST AND ONLY THING they did was propose this versioning scheme. When they didn’t get their way, they took their marbles and went home, did whatever the hell they felt like (in secret), and sprang it on the world 8 months later.

So yeah, when I read Microsoft apologists crying about how *super confusing* standards are, and how *difficult* they are to implement, as if Microsoft were just a HELPLESS FUCKING VICTIM of a cruel cruel world — as if they

Article about the future technologies that will form the backbone of the web, including:

• XHTML 1.0  - IE handles xml documents as HTML, providing no advantage to delivering content in XHTML.
• HTML5 - In development by the WHATWG, which is comprised of 3 of the 4 major browser vendors (guess which one is missing).  It seeks to define error-handeling for HTML parsers, so that browsers can handle ill-formed HTML in a consistant way.  Also adds many things developers have been wanting, such as persistent storage, form validation, the canvas tag, etc.  Backwards compatible, and likely to be the  standard to adopt.
  
• XHTML 2.0 - currently in development by the W3C, corrects some of the problems of XHTML, but unlikely to see adoption for many years, due to the fact that:

1. Poor support from Microsoft,
   
2. Not backwards compatable with HTML or XHTML 1 - it uses an entirely different namespace. 
   
3. Its not focused on developers like HTML5 is.