HTML5 Sucks. | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Sucks.

4 pointszobzu6 comments

Oh yes, sucks it does. Under the cover of standardization, it brought us the exact opposite.

HTML5 has been used as a shiny wrapper, that would lead you to believe it was a standard, and the right thing to do and use.

But HTML5 is not a finished spec, and might never it. Every month or week, another company submits a new implementation of a web related technology in to make it into the HTML5 spec. And every other company makes a different implementation.

What we end up with, is a gazillion of -webkit or -moz tags in CSS.

What we end up with, is a gazillion of javascript functions that work only with one browser engine, and javascript interface libraries on top in order to attempt to make things easier.

What we end up with, are 2 competing audio format implementations.

This could go on for a long, long while.

Oh and the winner? The one who will have the most influence on the w3 spec authors of course. But not the standards. Not the users. Not us.

For the sake of brevity, I'm only talking about HTML5, but this issue is also present with non-HTML specs such as SPDY, Dart, Native-code, and others. Those could be gold, if those were actual, discussed and accepted standards, so that the web could work the same everywhere, for everyone. Sadly, not the case.

Back to square 1 Mr web - please.

The -webkit- and -moz- prefixes are there for stuff that's not standardised yet. They're experiments, maybe they'll be standardised as is (sans prefix), maybe the behaviour will be tweaked and tried out in the wild some more.

Yeah, which is exactly part of what the rant is about in fact. It happens to be around for ages, and ages. In released products.

Well guess what - that's non-standard then!

So I'm browsing around and half the features don't work in Chrome because they're made for Firefox.

Then I browse around and half the features don't work (and usually entire sites!) in Firefox, because they're made for Chrome.

Tell me how that's good. Tell me how that's different from "Best viewed on IE and 1024x786".

Again, in the covert of HTML5 - or "just experiments" (which is another name for the same issue), the web is non-standard.

Of course the experiments are in released products. How else are we to find out whether proposed features are useful to designers or not?

Really you're ranting about poor web designers who don't understand that different web browsers behave differently, particularly w.r.t. newer features and especially w.r.t. unstandardised features. Do you really think poor web designers would stop designing mobile sites specifically for the iphone's screen dimensions and start taking the plethora of android devices into account if only they were restricted to html4 and css1?

C'mon dude, it's a bit chicken and egg.

What's the alternative? One singularity sits hidden in the dark to build a standardised format to be distributed and used by all with no debate or experimentation? or a infinite implementations of the same ideas each supported in their own way.

And your title, html5 sucks? its not really a problem of html5, html 4, xhtml, css, javascript, java pretty much anything that isn't controlled by a single entity is going to be hit with this issue.

HTML5 is the main transport for non-standardization today, hence the title. I think it fits.

The post is meant for debate.

I'm pretty much certain that everyone can agree that the web is currently non-standard, because its easy to demonstrate:

As I said in my other post, browse it with Chrome, then with Firefox, you can't view the same sites. Try to play Plink, linked from HN, in Firefox, or IE, or Opera. Nope. The reverse is also true. Heck most of us made websites and have used js libraries just because it simplifies the process. Most of use used -moz /-webkit for CSS3 stuff a year or two ago, and we still need them today.

I do not claim to have a solution. If the engineers building up tons of new awesome tech for the web are more aware about this issue, we might make it better together. Heck, in the past we were finishing the technology drafts and going onto the next version.

HTML5 has been in the works for years and I'm not quite sure it will ever get a "finished" stamp.

And I hope no one will propose "simple, kill Firefox, IE, Opera and lets all use Webkit!" :p

This person obviously didn't live through they great Netscrape IE war.

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