Ask HN: Does HTML5 excite you? Why or why not?
Please tell what perspective you're coming from: designer, programmer or both.
HTML 5 is clearly aiming to bring the open web platform up to par with desktop APIs. I expect many desktop applications to be developed using HTML5+CSS+JavaScript within just a few years.
And even if that doesn't spike your interest, there's the critically important role the HTML 5 spec pays in standardising what we already have. It's ridiculous that XMLHttpRequest, one of the most useful modern browser APIs, has no spec - every browser implements it by reverse engineering the others, who in turn reverse engineered IE (which is closed source, so who knows if they got it right?). HTML5 fixes that. It also specifies things like innerHTML, ContentEditable, the execution order for script files, all that DOM level 0 stuff that never made it in to an official spec.
Finally, HTML5 specifies a formal error model for HTML for the first time. This means it will actually be possible to implement a new browser from scratch without having to spend years reverse engineering the behaviour of IE and friends when faced with invalid markup.
I'm amazed to see so many web developers unexcited by HTML 5. This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!
As for browser support, it's happening right now. If you develop for the iPhone / mobile WebKit stuff most of the above features are sitting there waiting for you to use them. Try this page in your iPhone for example:
http://simonwillison.net/static/2009/navigator.geolocation.h...
Even IE is catching up - IE8 supported a bunch of HTML5 concepts (key/value based storage, cross document messaging, hashchange event and more) and IE9 is set to support even more.
HTML 5 is the most exciting thing to happen to web development in a very long time.
Formal specifications for things that had de facto cross-browser support for multiple browser generations are nice, but not amazing.
"This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!"
And that's just simply untrue, but oh, well.
"I'm amazed to see so many web developers unexcited by HTML 5. This is the first time our core platform has seen any serious evolution since HTML4.01 was published in 1999!"
And I'm boggled to see such giddy fanboyism modded up so high.
Now, give me something I couldn't do before with nearly-universal plugins.
The useful parts of HTML5 are the new JavaScript APIs (which arguably don't really belong). Unfortunately many important ones are missing, and of the ones which are present many are incomplete or broken.
I'll try re-wording my post:
I suspect <aside> and <article> will have the same styling possibilities as any other block level element for a particular version of CSS.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticsinhtml5
Though I agree that canvas, audio and video tags, and web workers are great additions.
HTML 5 (and its X counterpart) should mark an enormous shift in the usability and discoverability of web pages for users of assistive technologies, for indexers and cataloggers, and so forth. <canvas> doesn't turn me on nearly as much as <header>, <section>, <aside> and <footer> do.
And I desperately hope there's going to be a more usable and declarative schema for HTML 5 than "anything is valid if you carry out this long parsing procedure and it says it's valid".
I haven't seen anything exciting about it. It doesn't let me do anything significant that I couldn't with existing technology. It's just the New Style.
What do you mean we don't have enough details?http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
> So much could change
Like what?
I just can't help but think that this will fragment things a little bit further. I hope it won't, but I don't know whether we can expect all browsers to implement HTML5 at the same time.
Also, I wish they had taken the opportunity to rid the world of the massive failure that is CSS and replace it with a layout system that makes simple things simple.
Why is it a good idea to invent yet another syntax that is almost the same but not quite compatible?
Looking at the ridiculous guru culture that has formed around minor obscure CSS features is very telling. When that happens to a technology I call it a massive failure.
"HTML 5 is being written in two syntaxes: html and XML. Because SGML has never been deployed in browsers and many html authoring tools, HTML 5 defines a new serialization called html, which looks a lot like the previous known SGML."
Nope. It just bloats what we already have in xHTML 1.1. Sure, I can throw a header or section tag around a block, but I still have to use divs. It's just another level I need to indent at this point in time.
Let me help you count: Zero.
HTML5 is very little about e.g. the HEADER element, and much more about the underlying support for other features, such as geolocation, native sound and video, crossdomain XMLHTTPRequest, offline support and (yes,) much more.
Many of the HTML5 features you mentioned I don't see as being features that belong within a document structure language. Geolocation and Crossdomain XMLHTTPRequest are browser issues they have nothing to do with a document and don't belong in a spec for a document definition.
Native sound/video and offline support, of course, I agree with. But, if your application doesn't have the need for either of these features - what does HTML5 offer?
It doesn't excite me in the least because, since I can't afford to alienate big chunks of my audience, it might have enough penetration to use in, oh, 3-5 years? Meh.
Hopefully many of the people on IE 6 will leapfrog to a HTML 5 browser in the next few years, that would solve a lot of issues.
On the other hand, those developers whose audiences are ahead of the curve, or who don't mind the blasphemous "Please update your browser. Here are some good ones:" link, will push the industry forward until the number of people still using IE6, or FF1.5, or Mosaic or whatever, approaches zero. It will happen because people will get annoyed, or viruses, or new computers running new operating systems and browsers. In that way html5 is the best thing that could happen to the web. A backwards-incompatible version will (hopefully) throw the few stragglers, who spend money on the web but still don't need css2, into the 21st century.
My grandmother was, until very recently, using MacOS 9 with IE4. She did not care that her homepage (apple.com, as it had been since she bought the computer) was impossible to read. People still using IE6 and even IE7 in five years will not be the kind of person who spends a lot of time or money online.