Comment by toastedzergling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toastedzergling | Hacker News Reader

toastedzergling

I feel HTML5 today's "Web 2.0" of a few years ago. It's an overblown term that doesn't really capture what it is. CSS3 is cool. Canvas is cool. More native video is cool, I guess. The other new html elements are... ok... but quite frankily I'm fine with <div>s and changing them to <sections> seems annoying more so than helpful. HTML5 doesn't seem to bring anything radically new; most of what it allows could be done before, just with more workarounds and quirks. It's being hyped up as some next great thing, and not really a radical new development, it's much more incremental really.

And plenty of people are still using IE8 and Windows XP, and will for the next few years, so I don't think it's really more critical to learn HTML5 than over HTML4. Actually, it's hardly even possible to learn one without the other.

You should emphasize the "overblown term" part of that. Non-engineering-types who say HTML5 aren't literally talking about the W3C's HTML5 spec in isolation. What they mean is "frontend web technology". Non-engineers lump Backbone.js and HTML5 in the same bucket.

<section> tags have nothing to do with a normal person's understanding of HTML5. :)

Yes, to me HTML5 means more expensive testing, less browser support, and more effort on graceful degradation. I use HTML5 every day, and there is a good business case for e.g. HTML5 video so you have iOS support. But it's funny to see business people so enthusiastic about a cutting-edge tech; usually it's the programmers.

I think there is more to it than a buzzword though, the HTML5 way of doing web ie, paving the cow paths is radically different to the methodologies of XHTML, such that the range of technologies to be born/adopted out of that paradigm shift could be thought of as HTML5 era technologies.

"HTML5 doesn't seem to bring anything radically new" The canvas tag is radically new. Also, webgl isnt part of the HTML5 spec but its going to revolutionize browser gaming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com