HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation

https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5932

by okket • 10 years ago

149 65 10 years ago

w3.org

Osiris• 10 years ago

Is there a document somewhere that summaries the proposed changes from HTML 5 to 5.1?

piotrkubisa• 10 years ago

I assume this document [1] may cover some changes.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/changes.html#...

0x0• 10 years ago

Interesting that "Having title, or writing email to a friend does not make an img missing alt conformant." What if you write an email to an enemy? https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/changes.html#...

rspeer• 10 years ago

I found this table [1] that lists features specific to HTML 5.1 and their status in current versions of browsers.

[1] https://w3c.github.io/test-results/html51/implementation-rep...

myfonj• 10 years ago

There is also a diffed single page HTMLs at github [0], (11 MiB download; quite surprised my Firefox managed to render it).

What I've found interesting is that markup for insertions and deletions in this file is ("non-semantic") `<span class="delete">..</span><span class="insert">..</span>`, instead of presumably more semantically appropriate `<del>..</del><ins>..</ins>` [1].

[0] https://github.com/w3c/html/blob/master/diff/html5to51diff.h... [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/edits.html#el...

yuhong4• 10 years ago

I have been thinking of the "HTML5" buzzword and its problems for a while now.

moron4hire• 10 years ago

Care to elaborate? What specifically is wrong with HTML5? And how is it particularly worse than other offerings?

yuhong4• 10 years ago

I am talking about the buzzword. For example, <canvas> dates back to 2005, long before the term was commonly used in the first place.

lucideer3• 10 years ago

I don't think this is what yuhong was referring to, but there's a lot wrong with HTML5. Googling "w3c whatwg", as one commenter suggested, won't give you any real insight into the mess, but it will hint at it.

TL;DR The above document is irrelevant and should be ignored. Popular browsers' implementations define the HTML5 that most devs will want to target, and those browser vendors are members of the competing WHATWG body. They will largely ignore the W3C copy.

nbb• 10 years ago

I have been thinking about where to go to lunch.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

This is a completely irrelevant document. Browser makers follow standards written by the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), not the W3C.

I'm horribly oversimplifying, but to see the full ugliness, just google 'whatwg w3c'

roblabla• 10 years ago

Any specific article explaining what the difference between the two are ? My google being in french, I don't get much results...

okket• 10 years ago

Further down is a comment by LukeShu that explains the difference a bit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849105

domenicd3• 10 years ago

I tried to leave some details here on the situation downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849375

As for actual technical differences, the vast majority of them are bugs introduced during the copying process, or just places where they haven't caught up to our bug fixes/new features/removals of unimplemented features. (Bug fixes especially roll in quite frequently; see https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master .)

There are some differences around conformance requirements, as some of the W3C HTML editors see their fork as a venue for writing a nice official-looking documenton how they think certain HTML elements should be semantically interpreted and used. The big ones I remember are around figcaption, main, hgroup, and others. My favorite is when they made it a high priority to change one of the examples not to use the Flying Spaghetti Monster since it might be controversial. This does not affect implementations of browsers though, just what conformance checkers (validators) like http://checker.html5.org/ tell you about whether your document is conformant.

You can get a full comparison via the third-party tool https://diffofhtmls.herokuapp.com/.

IshKebab• 10 years ago

Basically W3C tries to define versioned HTML specifications, but they basically follow what browsers actually implement and are always out of date. WHATWG maintain a "living standard" and is really what browser vendors actually work with because it doesn't attempt the slow and futile task of defining a 'stable' versioned spec.

Something like that anyway.

positivecomment• 10 years ago

You already got many relevant answers but just in case you need it again, https://www.google.com/ncr redirects to the international version.

andrewmcwatters3• 10 years ago

This is a completely irrelevant document.

This is NOT true. W3C vs WHATWG is a "political" issue. Saying either group publishes completely irrelevant documents is misleading.

domenicd3• 10 years ago

Right, everything is relevant to someone. But the grandparent was talking about what is relevant to browser vendors (and thus web developers), in which case it's pretty clear.

lucideer3• 10 years ago

The W3C document may be relevant to some small minority but the majority of people developing using HTML5 are targeting a set of clients that mostly or entirely follow the WHATWG's version in their actual implementations, and this is what defines relevance.

The creation of the WHATWG was obviously a bad day for web standards, but at this point one has to be pragmatic. The existence of the W3C spec only adds confusion, and little to no value.

lambda• 10 years ago

The W3C HTML specs are pretty much irrelevant for anyone wanting to write a web browser, or author content designed to be consumed by web browsers.

haikuginger• 10 years ago

Rather, the WHATWG writes standards that comply with what browser makers do.

Manishearth2• 10 years ago

It goes both ways. Unspecced behavior might get specced by the whatwg. Of it turns out that whatwg's spec doesn't match most browsers, that is a spec bug. If it matches some browsers but not others it usually gets discussed and consensus is reached. Sometimes the spec does one thing, some browsers do a different thing, and some browsers do yet another thing. More discussion.

But new features like the fetch standard get written before implementations (with vendors and other stakeholders involved in the process), or simultaneously with implementations.

WoodenChair• 10 years ago

From section 1.5:

It must be admitted that many aspects of HTML appear at first glance to be nonsensical and inconsistent.

HTML, its supporting DOM APIs, as well as many of its supporting technologies, have been developed over a period of several decades by a wide array of people with different priorities who, in many cases, did not know of each other’s existence.

Features have thus arisen from many sources, and have not always been designed in especially consistent ways. Furthermore, because of the unique characteristics of the Web, implementation bugs have often become de-facto, and now de-jure, standards, as content is often unintentionally written in ways that rely on them before they can be fixed.

That kind of says it all when it comes to web standards!

Torgo2• 10 years ago

I think about this when I am using XMLHttpRequest in a web worker, and can't actually get an XML document back because you don't have access to an xml parser because there's no dom in web workers.

andrewmcwatters3• 10 years ago

Why would you use XMLHttpRequest in a web worker? Why would you not just delegate working with the result to a web worker? The requests shouldn't dispatch any faster.

wppick• 10 years ago

This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.

Not sure if this is serious. https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/introduction....

mstade• 10 years ago

I don't think it is. It reminds me of something I've read before. I immediately thought of Hitchiker's Guide, but can't find the reference so it might not be. Still, I have a very distinct feeling I've read this before.

Manishearth2• 10 years ago

It's mostly an import of the whatwg spec, which gets whimsical at times.

That is actually a pretty accurate representation of how reading entire specs with intent to implement goes. I've done this twice with the xhr and file specs :) Maybe not the reading backwards part.

HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation

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