W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/w3c-declares-html5-standard-done/

by darklrd • 12 years ago

232 79 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

yuhong3• 12 years ago

Wonder when the IE standard support documents listing all the "deviations" from HTML5 will happen.

kyriakos• 12 years ago

latest versions of IE are pretty good regarding standards.

recursive• 12 years ago

I wonder when they will get as good as the rest of the browsers that are out. I still find more bugs in IE11 than any other current browser.

nostrademons3• 12 years ago

The other huge accomplishment of HTML5 is completely standardizing many fundamental parts of the web that previously were a mess of browser incompatibilities. 6 years ago, if you wanted to parse HTML, you might reach for BeautifulSoup, or libxml, or Hpricot, or Nokogiri...and they would all be subtly different in the parse tree they produced. And they couldn't do any better, because if you viewed the page in IE, or Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari, you might get a different parse tree.

Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.

malandrew3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the mention of the Gumbo parser. I didn't know about that project.

From what I found, it seems like this is the most mature NodeJS module for using Gumbo:

https://github.com/karlwestin/node-gumbo-parser

pjmlp7• 12 years ago

Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.

The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that description.

killertypo3• 12 years ago

Is there any particular reason? Requiring support for older or legacy browsers?

I just recently wrapped up a project utilizing customized Twitter Bootstrap / CSS3 / HTML5 and I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth everything went between IE/Chrome/Safari/FF. This is the first time, in a long time, that everything just "worked."

ufo• 12 years ago

Are you talking about inconsistent HTML parsing or inconsistent CSS rendering? The latter is much more of a pita than the former.

lucideer• 12 years ago

The term "WHATWG" seems to be conspicuously absent from this article. I wonder where they factor into this announcement.

yuhong3• 12 years ago

I think they already moved to living standard.

dpkendal• 12 years ago

Indeed, the W3C's work on HTML5 is irrelevant. It exists only for the purpose of giving the W3C-qua-organization the appearance of being involved in the further development of HTML.

masklinn• 12 years ago

The living standard was never abandoned in the first place, and W3C's HTML5 is basically a fork of the WHATWG living standard.

vsync• 12 years ago

Which means no standard at all.

I'm grateful to W3C for continuing their standardization work.

jaredmcateer• 12 years ago

Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

yuhong3• 12 years ago

I think even the W3C rejected DOCTYPE versioning, it is still just <!DOCTYPE html>.

rimantas• 12 years ago

No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

'You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.' //

You're wrong if your asserting that any doctype produces the same results globally but it probably doesn't matter unless you're targeting legacy UA.

See e.g. "Appendix: Handling of Some Doctypes in text/html" at https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/ or Eric Meyer's http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/... (for MacIE5 ... like I said it probably won't matter!).

kibibu• 12 years ago

I have vague memories of Frames not working under the HTML4 Strict doctype

scriptproof• 12 years ago

Maybe but if you use real DOCTYPE such as <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> then you will see huge difference in rendering.

currysausage• 12 years ago

Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

Well, do you think browser vendors will just stop implementing new features because the W3C decides that HTML 5 finished?

gsnedders5• 12 years ago

http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/ is an interesting overview of perspectives of various people who've been around HTML5 for years about its publication as a REC.

malandrew3• 12 years ago

I'm hoping for a scene graph standard for HTML6 and a spec that allows multiple documents per window (which themselves could be nodes on a scene graph) instead of the one document per window.

sigvef• 12 years ago

Iframes sort-of do this already.

annamarie• 12 years ago

HTML5 is a living standard, no? There isn't going to be an "HTML6".

thristian• 12 years ago

The spec published by WHATWG is a living standard, and is just called "HTML". The expectation is that every so often the W3C will pick a revision of the WHATWG's HTML spec and stamp it with a version number.

cwyers4• 12 years ago

Well, this announcement seems to indicate that from W3C's point of view, it's not living anymore. They've finalized the standard, and are starting work on HTML 5.1. WHATWG apparently no longer numbers their standard. [1]

1) https://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5

indubitably• 12 years ago

The most important thing about HTML5 is <video>? What a weird statement.

malandrew3• 12 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Solving tag soup would be the most important thing in my opinion.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

Maybe they mean for end users? Most people aren't going to care if developers have an easier job with browser compatibility.

bouk• 12 years ago

Making Flash obsolete is pretty important

general_failure• 12 years ago

Video doesn't kill the flash star.

j4meserljoness• 12 years ago

Cool, but It doesn't really matter what W3C says. In the end it is all about what the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers decide to implement.

valisystem• 12 years ago

the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers

In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their own browser initiative.

All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided to follow W3C.

You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still have a very important place in the browser game.

domenicd4• 12 years ago

This is pretty much the opposite of how things went down.

If browsers followed the W3C, we'd be living in XML utopia (XHTML2, XForms, XLink, XEvents, etc.). In 2004 a group of implementers (specifically Mozilla, Opera, and Apple) proposed to the W3C to focus on web applications by evolving HTML and the DOM, but were flat-out turned down, and had to go off and form their own standards organization---the WHATWG. Today, that is where much of the foundational work of the web platform is still done: https://spec.whatwg.org/

codeaken• 12 years ago

Final standards document

http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/

RexRollman• 12 years ago

This announcement makes me miss Mark Pilgrim. I wish he was still publishing his blog.

taf2• 12 years ago

i guess it's finally time to upgrade that .vimrc to include syntax highlighting for the new tags... canvas, video, audio, nav, section, etc..

ushi• 12 years ago

i know it was just a joke, but for vim users working with html i recommend the html5 plugin[0].

[0] https://github.com/othree/html5.vim

cwyers4• 12 years ago

This CNet article seems to have a lot more detail than the Techcrunch one:

http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-...

johansch• 12 years ago

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-sti...

""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."

It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final' version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."

cwyers4• 12 years ago

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

kijin• 12 years ago

I dunno, perhaps if the W3C and WHATWG produced radically different specifications, one of them would be explicitly rejected by everyone and thus die a clean death. That might be better than having two very similar, equally authoritative, but subtly different specifications, one of which is sort of but not quite a snapshot of the other.

domenicd4• 12 years ago

Yes, actually. We'd encourage the HTML working group to do original work. Many W3C working groups do that, e.g. the webapps working group worked on web components and various other specs, and it helps the web platform.

deskamess• 12 years ago

I was hoping they would add file api support for downloading to non sand boxed environment with mandatory user interaction prompts. The api would prompt for the file download location (via file dialog) but after that, how the file is filled up is up to the web client (and happens in the background). This would allow for parallel download workers via the existing get range option.

yoran• 12 years ago

Kind of ironic that the embedded Vimeo video in the article is Flash.

W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

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