Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Richard Clark — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 10:44:15 GMT

@Ricardo - Dialog is no longer in the spec (don't quote on me on this but I seem to remember it was because Microsoft said they wouldn't implement it).

@Tims - We do have other term(s) for 'HTML5' the marketing term. How about 'Open Web Standards', 'Web Standards', 'HTML5 & related technologies' or how about 'Emerging web technologies' (in fact did you say that yourself in a comment - I can't see because of the paginated comments).

More importantly though while HTML5 is used as an umbrella term for marketing types, your audience on this blog is hardly those people. You're talking to developers that are in the trenches, who understand what HTML5 is so I'd expect you to be able to correctly define the technologies here.

Finally, like Bruce & Shelley I'm interested as to why no data-* attributes?

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

designorant — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 10:05:01 GMT

Microsoft is to emerging web as Apple is to open source.

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Ricardo — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:42:15 GMT

I'm also curious about the attributes. Why use these non-standard "namespaced" attribute names when you have data-* specifically for that purpose?

And where are the HTML5 tags? Semantics? The dialog element?

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Tim Sneath — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:30:21 GMT

Mark, I think we need to find a suitable alternative umbrella term if we don't want HTML5 to be used as a term both for the core specification and the family of modern web technologies. It's going to be tough to persuade a publisher that the "correct" title for a book is "HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, Canvas 2D API, ARIA, WOFF, and Indexed DB for Dummies" :) I'm genuinely interested in this topic - there's no hidden agenda. A few of us toyed with "Web 5.0" for a while, but I don't think that works.

I think a few folk commenting have a slightly different impression of what we were setting out to achieve with these demos. To be clear, the goal wasn't to create the ultimate HTML5 core spec reference site. I'm sure across the 30+ sites we partnered with, you can find some things to pick apart in terms of their usage of HTML - and I quite look forward to that kind of "technical audit" discussion. But while interesting, the point was more to show the kind of quality experience you can now build with browsers that just a few months ago would often have been impossible to accomplish without a plug-in. I personally think that's an exciting development that many web developers people will be delighted in, not least those who are still skeptical of our investment in web standards.

VivaClient, you'll be pleased to hear that I have a couple of Silverlight and WPF articles queued up already. Stay tuned - I haven't met the "overlords" yet...

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

VivaClient — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:43:14 GMT

Where is the WPF discussions? where is the Silverlight discussions? WHERE!.

We thought you were cool Tim, but you've sold out to the HTML5 overlords.

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

AnyWordAboutThis — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 16:56:18 GMT

Where is the HTML5/CSS3 support on IE9???

www.impressivewebs.com/html5-support-ie9

www.impressivewebs.com/css3-support-ie9

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Shelley — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 13:54:43 GMT

Ah, HTML5--the breakfast of champions.

I do like seeing SVG used inline in HTML. Hopefully other uses will follow.

Question: Bruce asked about why you didn't use data-* attributes. I was curious myself about this.

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Mark Wassmer — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:05:28 GMT

I think that the discussion here in the comments raise an serious point, that being the use of HTML5 as an umbrella term for "emerging web" technologies.

I have concerns that HTML5 will become common place as a reference for SVG, CSS3, GeoLocation and the like, as they are frequently seen in the same context or writings without any clear definitions. We have an opportunity whilst HTML5 is still in draft to make a clear distinction between these technologies/specifications and educate not only those that will be on the frontline using these them, but also those that will be in a position to commission projects using these technologies.

It's possible. Just look at XHTML and CSS, a very clear distinction was made very early on and adopted with little fuss. We are all familiar with those little badges that were very popular a few years back stating my site is valid XHTML and Valid CSS, 2 badges, 2 technologies clearly seen as such. so why not in this instance. (Note: No I'm not advocating lots of little badges.....).

I would hate to see HTML5 become the new Web 3.0, simply through lack of education.

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

Rob Hawkes — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 10:13:25 GMT

Tim, it's quite obvious you didn't do any research before writing that last comment. All of those features you just mentioned are in the HTML5 spec.

Also, why do you insist on calling technologies not in the spec "HTML5" when you quite obvious are against the idea? It's not HTML5, and never will be. I'm surprised to find Microsoft employees pushing this misconception to the public. You're just making it worse!

re: Inside an HTML5 Interactive Experience: Never Mind the Bullets

bruce lawson — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 10:00:57 GMT

Glad you liked the book, Tim! And you're correct: Web Workers, Web Sockets etc are in our book, but not in the W3C spec, but they are all related WHATWG APIs, so that is "a slightly broader set of technologies", and are contained in www.whatwg.org/.../complete.html

Adding graphics specifications like SVG, font specs like WOFF and styling specs like CSS is stretching the bounds of credibility too far, in my opinion - and, from what you said, your opinion too. So we're agreeing.

But I'm still genuinely at a loss to understand why, when you had the opportunity to use some genuine HTML5 features (new semantic tags, data-* attributes) you elected for HTML 4 constructs or just invalid markup.