Html 5/xhtml 2

Just a few bits of information for website developers out there.

Looks like HTML 5 is finally going to finish the transition of the old font style tags over to CSS. I am wondering how well it is going to work to have the audio and video tags though.

HTML 5 **** Sheet (PDF) | Freebies | Smashing Magazine

Also I saw this article on XHTML 2.

W3C stops work on XHTML 2 - SD Times: Software Development News

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Comments

tiersten

Nobody can agree on what format the video tag should use so that it still pretty much up in the air still.

Apart from removing bunch of tags which are no longer valid, HTML 5 mainly adds tags to help with semantic systems.

wastedtime

tiersten wrote: »

Nobody can agree on what format the video tag should use so that it still pretty much up in the air still.

Well according to the second article WHATWG's work was the start of WC3's work on HTML 5 so I would assume that those in WHATWG would support it. The question I mostly had was how these browsers are going to do cross platform for example OS X, Windows, Linux, etc. The ONE thing I am pretty sure of thought is what ever came out of WHATWG's work that is going into HTML 5 is not going to be supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer.

tiersten

The debate is Ogg Theora vs h.264 for the official HTML 5 codec that should be supported at a minimum.

tiersten

wastedtime wrote: »

The question I mostly had was how these browsers are going to do cross platform for example OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.

The only one that really is stuck to a single platform is IE. The Mac version of IE hasn't been updated in a long time now. Firefox, Opera and Safari are all cross platform so you'll be able to find something that supports HTML 5 unless you're running a non mainstream OS or OS version.

wastedtime wrote: »

The ONE thing I am pretty sure of thought is what ever came out of WHATWG's work that is going into HTML 5 is not going to be supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Microsoft are a lot better regarding trying to stick to established standards now. IE8 is a significant improvement over older versions.

dynamik

The thing that sucks is the enormous amount of people using antiquated browsers. Try getting them to update IE, let alone to switch to something else. Until browsers that support this become a majority (by a long shot), we're still going to have to develop for the lowest common denominator or develop multiple versions. This is why I abandoned web development a long time ago. I don't have the patience to deal with this stupid BS.

msteinhilber

dynamik wrote: »

The thing that sucks is the enormous amount of people using antiquated browsers. Try getting them to update IE, let alone to switch to something else. Until browsers that support this become a majority (by a long shot), we're still going to have to develop for the lowest common denominator or develop multiple versions. This is why I abandoned web development a long time ago. I don't have the patience to deal with this stupid BS.

That is a royal pain, I got into the web design and hosting market in 99. I can't pinpoint when, probably around 2001 or 2002 I really grew a distaste for design for this along with other reasons (mostly problems related to working with clients though) and shifted to focus just on shared hosting and dedicated servers. Got out of that when it really became extremely difficult to market quality support and reliability along with a price I was comfortable with when you had the oversellers out there apparently using new unlimited size hard drives and "no" bandwidth limits. Now all of my design work is mostly limited to strictly personal stuff and internal work for my employer where we control the browser(s) used.

I like where the web is headed, supporting more cross-browser compatibility but there are still those out there dragging their feet. One big gripe of mine is a big letdown in my organizations industry (real estate) with the MLS system that most of our agents use to manage contacts, listings, marketing, etc. It is heavily dependent on ActiveX and as of now it is the only resource that is still keeping us on a Windows platform for all of our company owned workstations, otherwise we would be switching over to Linux/OpenOffice. It's also a burden for a handful of our Realtors who use Mac's and as a result are forced to purchase Bootcamp or Parallels and run XP on it.

tiersten

Assuming your browser supports CSS properly (which some IE versions don't) then HTML 5 is mostly backwards compatible. The new semantic tags are in addition to the existing formatting ones so an older browser should just ignore them.

msteinhilber wrote: »

It's also a burden for a handful of our Realtors who use Mac's and as a result are forced to purchase Bootcamp or Parallels and run XP on it.

VMware Fusion you mean? Bootcamp should come with OSX if it is new enough. Either way, you need an XP license.

msteinhilber

tiersten wrote: »

VMware Fusion you mean? Bootcamp should come with OSX if it is new enough. Either way, you need an XP license.

I haven't worked with Fusion, just Bootcamp which we see mostly now for those that purchase new equipment and some that use Parallels on the older versions of OSX. I really dislike Parallels though since the default behavior is to use NAT so it's always a hassle to try to walk an end user through switching it to bridged since our remote control software isn't compatible with OSX and requires them to be on one of our subnets (we are not allowed to utilize the reverse connection feature of our remote app).

We are beginning to look into the possibility of using some Server 2008 terminal services and publishing Internet Explorer as a remote app. I know back in mid 2008 it wasn't possible to do so on OSX and/or Linux clients so hopefully there have been some improvements in RDP clients for these OS's that bring support for the TS remote app feature.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this thread!

Slowhand

Man, looks like I'm not the only one that abandoned web design/development when the standards-battles really heated up. (I swear, if I hear ONE MORE person tell me, "it's a standardized feature, it's supported in FireFox and no other browser, so everyone else should change their product instead of making me change a few lines of code," I'll scream.)

It's fun when new features and standards come out, but it always feels like such a holy war to me. No one agrees on how things should "really" work, clients and customers seem to have the idea that everything takes 5 minutes and is really easy, and people seem to think that magic is what happens behind the scenes, not coding, so they don't have to make up their minds about anything they want on their site. For some reason, the customers I used to design sites for were always that much more likely to make things complicated and painful than any other type of client, could never figure out why. After some time in that world, pressing my way up the mountain towards things like MCITP: EA and CCIE don't seem so hard, after all. . .