HTML5 and where it's going

[drhowarddrfine]

I've been tinkering with HTML5 for quite some time though not lately. O'Reilly was surprised by how much you can use in modern browsers today, or at least by the end of June.
If you're like me, you had no idea there was so much HTML 5 already in play.
Yet Google, Mozilla, and Palm gave us all a big whack upside the head this morning. As Shakespeare said, "The hot blood leaps over the cold decree." The technology is here even if the standards committees haven't caught up. Developers are taking notice of these new features, and aren't waiting for formal approval. That's as it should be. As Dave Clark described the philosophy of the IETF with regard to internet standardization, "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."

Support by four major browsers adds up to "rough consensus" in my book.

Of course, even though Microsoft chairs the HTML5 group and vowed "strong support for HTML 5 in IE8", O'Reilly noticed this comment by a Google VP:
Microsoft has announced that it will support HTML 5, and as Vic noted, "We eagerly await evidence of that."

[gsnedders]

Equally yesterday, Google yesterday showed off an HTML 5 (http://www.youtube.com/html5) version of YouTube (as far as I know, this only works in Safari 4).

On the MS front, there have started to be quite a bit more in the way of emails from the IE team on public-html (where there's also been less in the way of flamewars, too, which is nice).

I guess the other thing of note that's been happening recently is RDFa-in-HTML, and who knows where that'll go…

[drhowarddrfine]

The trend I'm noticing is RDFa really taking off. There's been a lot of articles and commentary, as well as usage, I've noticed lately.

[drhowarddrfine]

Anne (http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/05/web-video) has some good stuff on HTML5 and video.

[gsnedders]

The trend I'm noticing is RDFa really taking off. There's been a lot of articles and commentary, as well as usage, I've noticed lately.

I think (ignoring the problems I see with distributed knowledge bases at a higher level which RDF does not address) one of the main problems right now is that RDFa in HTML is completely unspecified. While a lot of the content being sent as text/plain has an XHTML DOCTYPE that doesn't help the fact that attribute names are case-normalized, and @xmlns has no effect.

Yay. Undefined behaviour, and multiple (almost certainly incompatible) implementations. Chaos is come again, a terrible beauty is born. Here we go down the road of HTML, again.

[drhowarddrfine]

At least Microsoft admits they've heard of HTML5 somewhere. They claim they're doing lots of stuff (http://processingjs.org/blog/?p=77) with it. lol!