Posted on Friday 9 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), HTML 5, SVG and Web Forms 2.0, this article examines the future of HTML and what it will mean to Web authors, browser developers and their users. It covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C’s new Rich Client Activity and has some concerns about the restricted set of widgets compared to the current Ajax coding libs/frameworks:
Some of the richer ideas specified in HTML5 might now be made obsolete by the rise of Ajax-based browser interface toolkits. Why should developers be content with the restricted set of widgets specified in a document when they have an extensible toolkit to play with? It might well be that richer Web interfaces are standardized more by the market than by committee.
I’m glad to see progress made in describing commonly-implemented, but as-yet-unstandardized, technologies such as canvas and XMLHttpRequest, and hope that this will promote the interoperability of these important features. To move browser technology forward itself, HTML5 needs more clarity, and would benefit from being divided into three specifications, covering available now, available soon, and imagineering features.
April 8th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I searched a long time for such an great article. Thank you