Why is Microsoft trying to distract us with HTML 5?

Posted in Commentary, Design, Industry Insights by Sophia Lambrou on December 11th, 2007

The website best-practices watchdogs at A List Apart published an interesting article on the improvements of HTML 5, discussing new controls, structure, and a host of other changes. As explained by author Lachlan Hunt:

“To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics.”

But really, this is just a description of a draft. Work on HTML 5 actually began about three years ago, and even though it may start being used within the next few years, it probably won’t be complete for another 15 years! That’s right—a decade and a half. That’s an absolute eternity for an “upgrade,” especially in an industry that is basically in a constant state of accelerated evolution.

Work on HTML 5 is being carried out as a joint effort from many key players, the W3C HTML WG, the WHATWG, and representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft.

I’m all for advancements in HTML, but I can’t help but think there are bigger problems that this high-powered group could be tackling. Instead of giving us new markup for structuring, such as header and footer tags, how about focusing on standards compliance, rendering differences, and overall cross-browser incompatibilities? Truth is, Web developers aren’t being held back by HTML 4. They are being held back because of Internet Explorer; Microsoft doesn’t follow any rules and renders differently from all other browsers.

Even though we’ve seen many improvements in IE7, IE6 is still the browser of choice by over 60% of the population, including all major federal agencies. Like the article states, Web developers “seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers.”

These problems, however, are not in the structuring and layout of the HTML code. They’re on scripting and styling (JavaScript and CSS), and the incompatibility of old and new browsers.

If this group really wants to produce something new that will “give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications,” they should throw out this draft, force Microsoft to play by the rules, and figure out how to get users up-to-speed on what’s current.

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2 Responses to 'Why is Microsoft trying to distract us with HTML 5?'

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  1. Ian Hickson said,

    on December 12th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Hi. I’m the editor of the HTML5 spec and spokesman for the WHATWG.

    The new structure elements are actually just a minor part of the work. The biggest part of the work has been defining the edge cases so that we can get all the browsers to converge on one set of rules — HTML4 doesn’t, for instance, define how to handle syntax errors, but HTML5 defines that in detail. We’re acutely aware of how authors have problems with different browsers, and we want to resolve that.

    Regarding Microsoft, it’s not clear how we can force them to play by the rules. I’m certainly open to suggestions. If you have any advice on how to make them more compliant, please do e-mail them to me at ian@hixie.ch — note that I’ve already tried things like Acid2 (I was the main person who wrote that test) as well as making test suites (I was involved in the Web Standards Project early on, in the “CSS Samurai”, as well as having written a massive number of test cases for browsers at http://hixie.ch/tests/ ). Nothing seems to work.

  2. Lachlan Hunt said,

    on December 12th, 2007 at 7:30 pm

    You’ll be pleased to know that the HTML5 spec is putting a lot of effort into interoperability issues with HTML. In particular, well defined parsing, error handling and other processing requirements to help ensure all browsers can reliably handle both new and existing content.

    While it is certainly true that rendering issues are of major concern to web developers, such problems are the domain of CSS, not HTML. It is important that effort be put into improving the support and interoperability of both HTML and CSS, but work on each is being carried out separately. CSS and rending issues are largely out of scope for HTML.

    Thanks for your feedback.

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