Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts 280
bonch writes "On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML 5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. They've given some feedback on the current editor's draft, saying that they 'have more questions than answers' and criticizing many of HTML 5's new tags, like <header>, <footer> and <aside>, calling them 'arbitrary' or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."
Re:MS HTML5 (Score:5, Interesting)
... In before the "lolwut?" (Score:5, Interesting)
While everyone should keep an eye on Microsoft (*was always) this is generally a good thing for the Internet as a whole. We as consumers, and we as web-developers, alike will be a lot happier if all the major players can create a consistent experience.
If Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are all on board before the spec' is even in the final stages we have a fairly good shot of similar behavour no matter the platform or browser.
A lot of Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are either - "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently" or "Do we need this?" Both of which are fair questions to ask and something that others will want to answer before HTML 5 goes live.
Re:Lol wut? (Score:5, Interesting)
Factor in most browsing stats are from slackers on their work PCs, not home machines.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
Usage patterns vary a lot among countries, but the general trend is: IE usage drops on weekends, Fx usage climbs on weekends.
Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is something Opera could actually push quite much via other countries. Opera has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries [opera.com], better than both FF and IE. They push the support for HTML5 and its new tags there and CIS websites adopt it (cyrillic language differences make it so that most people use local websites instead of US ones). IE and FF also has to start supporting the same to get marketshare there, and bam: you have the support elsewhere too. And they can also start supporting it on Wii, Mobile Phones and other accessories they make web browsers too. People usually underestimate the power of Opera because of their smaller marketshare (in US home PC's).
Re:Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:brace yourself.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox, Opera, Safari will show a standards compliant page in its all glory with complete functionality. If they don't, file a bug report. I can guarantee you it will be the second important issue to fix after a critical security flaw.
Opera 10 passes the very aggressive Acid 3 test, what are you talking about? Do you know how many millions of lines, manpower wasted just to make sites designed for their junk browser appear fine on those browsers?
About the MS puppets... Slashdot user for a long time here, we know who is who and all their tricks.
Re:brace yourself.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would you call him a "paid MS puppet" ?
Because obviously anyone that disagrees is being paid off.
Re:but you know how hard, complex Opera support is (Score:5, Interesting)
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
Re:Lol wut? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless the established internet starts to roll against them. Youtube has already publicly dropped support for IE6. If the video tag of HTML5 is 25% more efficient than flash and can save them a bundle on bandwidth, I imagine they'd drop flash.
All it takes is a few big sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail to say "We want HTML5, and we want it to work right." And anyone that comes along with a non-compliant browser gets pointed towards Safari, Chrome, Opera, or Firefox. IE9 will either adapt or die.
Re:Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? (Score:1, Interesting)
Behold! IE has fallen below 60% officially. [statcounter.com]
Re:Lol wut? (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera actually has major marketshare in Russia and CIS countries [opera.com]. They're the major player there, and IE and FF strugling behind. The usual marketshare statistics almost always just count US or major EU countries, ignoring everything else and it gives false statistics because they ignore almost half of the world's people.
What I find quite interesting is that those CIS countries have found the best alternative browser, even in general population. Maybe theres some intelligence to catch up in usa? :)
Re: Pointer bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. As a former debugger developer I used to highlight this particular issue -- we even had a trade show cut-out figure named Bugsy Malone who was wanted for assaulting a global with a deadly pointer. (Hey, it gave the geeks a smile and the suits didn't know what it meant.)
However, as a developer I would say that bad pointers were at most 1% or 2% of our problems, if that. Non-thread-safe threaded code and leaked memory were much bigger issues at the time (1980's).
Cold water (Score:2, Interesting)
I read the mailing list post by Microsoft. The overall impression is Microsoft mainly pouring cold water on the HTML 5 spec.
Why are they posting these objections just now? These tags appeared in the first official draft on the W3's web site a year and a half ago.
Let's review what we know about Microsoft:
1. If they could sell us paper plates for $1,000 each, they would.
2. If their browser held 99% market share, they would completely ignore this spec.
I can see how a programmer who has read a lot about "semantic purity" might think the new tags are superfluous. But is Microsoft a company known for its pursuit of elegance and academic purity? Its post is just plain rude. This late in the game, and so full of negativity (disguised as "questions"), it's the sign of a company grumpily giving in.
Now, about the alleged superfluity of the tags, you might as well call all tags but one, a generic <div> tag, superfluous. Just use one tag, and add classes to it (<div class="paragraph">, <div class="heading">.
<aside> has the same effect as <div class="aside"> but with the benefit to the programmer of less typing, and the benefit of the web of more uniformity (instead of <div class="aside">, <div class="marginalia">, and <div class="tangent"> in different web sites).
For a while I drank the "semantic" Kool-Aid. It has a point, but like most dogmas, taken to an extreme, it approaches absurdity. After a while, I returned to the table [combatentropy.com].
Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Spoiled kid better learn the rules already (Score:3, Interesting)
With properly designed CSS and Javascript, you can always have a fallback that basically equates to "how you would've done it in HTML 4", that'll work just fine in IE.
In my new sites, IE users get a functional app, but not a pretty, or even necessarily ajaxy one.
It's extra work, but you end up supporting all sorts of crippled browsers, from lynx, to cell phones, to IE.
Re:Lol wut? (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not know why Opera is so popular in Russia (and CIS / ex-USSR / Eastern Europe), but let me make a guess.
Computers came to Eastern Europe much later than in the West, and PCs later still. When they did appear, they triggered the same effect that was previously seen in the West, however - the birth and spread of the "hacker" culture among those susceptible to it. People tinkered with machines, found interesting hacks and ways around limitations, and so on.
The difference was that all this happened on PCs. There were no PDPs or similar machines (they were there earlier, but not in sufficient quantities, and never as accessible as in Western universities). Thus, the first generation raised on DOS, and the second saw the migration to Windows.
This resulted in an unusually high concentration of DOS/Win power users in those countries. And when Internet, and later the browser wars, came, that situation still persisted - most computer users in Russia were still mostly in the "power user" category by Western standards. Because of that, animosity towards IE was a very early phenomenon, and predated the appearance of today's common alternatives such as Mozilla or Firefox (some people have stubbornly stuck to NN, but it was clearly inferior). So, at that time, Opera was the only reasonable alternative. It actually worked, it was fast, and it had lots of nifty features that IE wouldn't see for years to come (such as MDI, which was a precursor to tab browsing).
One minor thing there was that Opera isn't free. But in Russia in particular, the software culture had long been centered around using pirated software, often distributed from friend to friend. In fact, you could get odd looks by using licensed software at home ("Where does this guy get so much money to waste it on stuff that everyone else gets for free?"), and many people didn't even understand the concept of licensed commercial software and pirating - as far as they were concerned, if you could copy it, then surely it is okay to do so. And so, the price of Opera simply never entered into equation.