R.I.P. HTML5, Long live HTML

[JosephLeo]

So yesterday the W3C (http://www.w3.org/) or the World Wide Web Consortium released a logo (http://www.w3.org/html/logo/) for the HTML 5 Standard (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html) which seemed to have sparked a little controversy in the web development community. A little information though, the W3C is the organization who writes up the specifications of pretty much the world wide web and is lead by THE inventor of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee). This makes them essentially the authority of the web.

But now in comes some news today that "HTML5" should not be called as such, but rather simply "HTML" as HTML is not a framework, but a living, evolving standard. Who released this news? Well, it wasn't the W3C...but it came from an equally important source called the WHATWG (http://whatwg.org) or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. They are formed by individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software, or basically three of the "Big Five Web Browsers" way back in 2004.

So, where did I hear this news? right on the WHATWG blog (http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5).

[TopLevelComp]

W3C was good for the earlier stages of the internet, but now, it's just a hindrance, at least in my opinion. They take forever to implement changes or to even consider a release candidate a standard. CSS3 was proposed in 01, that's 10 years. It only took 3 between CSS 1 and CSS 2. For gods sake, they are STILL working on CSS 2, which became a Recommendation in 98.

In my opinion, the W3C needs to get rid of their leadership and bring in new leadership, technology is developing at such a fast pace at this time web standards shouldn't be taking 10 years to become "standard."

[MrUnknown]

I agree that w3c needs to speed up. I didn't know when CSS was proposed or anything, so hearing that it takes 10 years is absolutely stupid.

as for removing the "5," I am not sure what I think. Version 5 is the most versatile of them all so I don't see a reason that they would need to rewrite it anytime soon. I just wish it was less verbose. In my adventures in Ruby and Rails, I found something called HAML and fell in love writing HTML in it.

http://haml-lang.com/try.html

It simply converts a different markup into regular HTML, but uses indentation for tag contents. Though, in some cases I find it is harder to read than regular HTML, but that is usually with some weird ruby code mixed in.