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Comments: 280 +- Technology: Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts on Saturday August 08 2009, @08:18AM
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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."
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Lol wut? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
Whatever Microsoft decides to implement is going to become a defacto standard.
It's the sad but true result of still significant share of the browser market.
Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever Microsoft decides to implement is going to become a defacto standard.
It's the sad but true result of still significant share of the browser market.
Their market share is crumbling away year upon year, and this is despite new PCs coming with IE pre-installed and the default option. People are choosing to get an alternative. Factor in most browsing stats are from slackers on their work PCs, not home machines. HTML5 will not be targeted to people avoiding doing work at the office.
MS are about to be forced to offer a choice of browsers in other world markets, you can bet IE is going to take a hammering from that.
Most web devs don't give a hoot about IE specifics unless they're a doze only shop, few even bother with IE6 support any more unless contractually obliged to do so. If MS want to keep relevant, they are going to have to adhere to published specs. Their silly games of subtly breaking things to make devs code to IE is slowly coming to an end.
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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.
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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).
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but you know how hard, complex Opera support is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny that supporting Opera is nothing more than supporting W3C standards and give up 1990s lame tricks like browser sniffing. Same goes for Apple Safari (Webkit), Firefox.
It is not extra work, it is what they (webmasters) should be doing at first place.
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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.
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Re:but you know how hard, complex Opera support is (Score:5, Informative)
You should just ask what the browser can do rather than the browser name. That is the number 1 issue.
Apple has put some great information regarding capabilities detection, it can be applied to any browser not just Safari/Webkit.
http://developer.apple.com/Internet/webcontent/objectdetection.html [apple.com]
(no account etc. needed)
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Re: (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: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.
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the real standards will be used properly. They'll just be surrounded by ugly hacks to make sure the page renders properly in Internet Explorer.
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, that is exactly where the REST of the world is screwing up. We (meaning all the world outside of Redmond) need to set the standard, then comply with it. If/when pages don't render in IE, we need to shrug, and say, "So what?" IT IS NOT THE WORLD'S PROBLEM when MS chooses to break things. Ballmer wants to throw a chair, few of us notices, and even fewer give a damn. Ballmer wants to break IE, I don't notice, and I don't give a damn. Why does anyone else?
The correct procedure for website design, would be to test the site in FF, Opera, Safari, and/or any other standards compliant browser, and say you're done. Don't even TRY to load it in IE. If it loads, fine, if not, tough. If/when someone complains, just tell that individual that the page renders perfectly in any standards compliant browser, and that they should get one.
It is not the rest of the world's responsibility to "fix" MS screw ups.
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Re: (Score:3)
No, it's not the rest of the world's responsibility to fix IE.
It is a web developer's job to ensure that a website works for its users. I agree it'd be nice to give IE users the finger, but for the vast majority of business cases, it's nowhere near realistic.
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).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want people who doesn't have power/basic knowledge to install a compliant browser to be my customers anyway.
Nice job if you can get it...
The rest of us are stuck with the "graceful degradation" (what a wonderful oxymoron that is) that's required if the browser is determined to be IE. The major problem is that when you want to *move forward* -- start using powerful CSS, canvas, and actually have a JavaScript engine that can run JS, as opposed to "crawl" it. In these cases you don't have much of a choice -- you either give up on functionality that's core to the app that you're designing, or give IE users the fin
Re:Spoiled kid better learn the rules already (Score:4, Funny)
People that happilly spend their money on a crappy OS with a crappy browser are EXACTLY the kind of customers you want to buy your obviously crappy, "it worked fine in the laboratory"-style products.
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:5, Insightful)
The MSIE market share has been failing in big numbers lately. I wouldn't be so certain that the old truth is the same as the new truth.
That said, it is undeniable that MS will embrace and extend in ways that will break everyone else's implementation. One expectation is that they will implement the video functionality that, while officially removed from the HTML5 standard, will be implemented by everyone anyway. With that said, they will implement one of THEIR codecs that will not work "without a license." There is plenty of room for typical MS shenanigans when implementing HTML5, but you can bet they will not score any higher than 30 on the HTML5 acid test and that will be by design.
But if Microsoft's browser dominance falls below 50% any time soon, all bets are off -- they will not be able to afford to pull off a non-standard browser too well because the perception will then be "still broken" as web developers are increasingly free to build web sites using standards instead of MSIE idiosyncrasies in mind.
The fact is, it is getting increasingly popular to "rebel" against Microsoft right now. My prediction is that Microsoft will try and will fail in playing their "old game" and are in less of a position to change the rules as they have in the past.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose that the "good guys" win. There's a big bump in FF/Webkit usage and developers begin to drop support for IE (in its current, "this is how we do things here" incarnation). Does Microsoft have a plan B? Do they have a fast, competent, compliant, cross-platform browser stashed in the garage? They certainly have the manpower to pull it off (Visual Studio
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Re:Lol wut? (Score:4, Informative)
The video/audio tags have NOT been removed, their just wasn't a consensus on what codecs should be used, thus their is nothing specified about the codecs in the specs. You know what, that's exactly the same as for example the image-tag.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is on their way to miss the train. If they hadn't been catching up at all the web would have been running away from them and out of their control. They think that Silverlight is the solution to everything, but in reality it isn't.
That they finally takes interest means that they have started to worry about losing their advantage. And things can go extremely fast if someone succeeds in a solution that is the next killer app.
Re: (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.
MS HTML5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MS HTML5 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They will just "extend" the standard and call all other implementations broken.
That's not so easy anymore; they have a fight against Google, Apple, the EU, Mozilla's momentum, etc.
For evidence, just look at their silverlight [youtube.com] adoption rates.
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They already call XHTML 1.0 strict sites broken under IE 8. They cite "errors on the page" with yellow "!".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They cite "errors on the page" with yellow "!".
Ah Microsoft, with their silent/invisible "rendering by this browser" after the word "page".
For this one, RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
The usual journalistic nightmare of a summary.
They did not call header and footer arbitrary or unnecessary. They questioned the implementation as to validity for printing.
They did call aside arbitrary as well as section.
From reading the post, I see a lot of good insights into what might be an overly-cluttered and, in places, badly written standard. While there is always an element of Microsoft playing their own games, this does raise valid questions.
Re:For this one, RTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary seems reasonable to me, if a little brief. Addressing your specific comments:
They did not call header and footer arbitrary or unnecessary. They questioned the implementation as to validity for printing.
About these tags (among others), they said: "It's not clear why these new elements in particular are necessary." This implies that they see them as unnecessary, and question why the particular set was chosen (i.e. that they consider the set arbitrary). "Arbitrary and unnecessary" is a perfectly reasonable summary of the sentiment of this sentence.
The printing issue is probably secondary; they are no better or worse for printing than the div/span tags that MS appear to prefer.
Basically the point MS seem to be making is that they see little value in standardizing the semantic markup of these (and other) elements. They appear to be approaching it from a rather limited perspective of browser implementation (whether traditional or of the screen-reader type), without considering that there may be other ways of processing the documents in question where the new tags make a lot more sense.
From reading the post, I see a lot of good insights into what might be an overly-cluttered and, in places, badly written standard. While there is always an element of Microsoft playing their own games, this does raise valid questions.
I don't see that. WHATWG had good reasons for including the tags they chose as semantic markup that extend beyond browser implementation concerns, and MS seem to be ignoring those reasons (which are well documented in the mailing list archives). There are one or two comments that make some sense (the date/time input field concern, that the format of date specifications passed as attributes to the tag does not allow specification of a timezone, is somewhat serious, and a lot of what they're saying about the application installation feature makes sense), but overall the impression I get is that they've failed to see the bigger picture.
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Re:For this one, RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Too Late, Hot Plate (Score:5, Insightful)
This *is* the process for this. The HTML 5 spec is not even remotely close to being done. "Too late" does not apply.
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... 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:... In before the "lolwut?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the "lol wut" was the first post. You didn't quite make it.
That said, I've read the mailing list comments from the MS guy, and none of it seemed like unreasonable moaning. I agree that it's an excellent thing that MS is getting involved - IE's market share may be declining, but it's still the dominant browser, and I think MS is still capable of doing tremendous amounts of damage to emerging web standards if they refuse to support them.
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Re:... In before the "lolwut?" (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are [...] "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently"
Wow, I wonder [forums.scc.ca] where they got that from?
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Re: new HTML5 tags... "Do we need this?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone now does a websearch for the keyword term "traction engine" using Bing, and they find that your blog seems to have >300 posts mentioning that very subject. Then they get quite pissed off with you, because they keep visiting pages on your site and finding that the blog entries referenced don't have anything at all to say about their favourite subject. What's happened is that when you posted the article, the title got copied into the auto-maintained "recent posts" list widget on your blog's sidebar, and the Google and Bing search engines don't know how to distinguish between the linked text in your blog widgets and the contents of the main article. And not only does Google now think that you have 300 separate pages on traction engines, but since you included that cute little widget that lists the current top ten stories on CNN, Google and Bing also thinks that you have 300 blog postings about Michael Jackson, and also about a bunch of unsavoury keyword stuff that's currently in the news.
So if someone's seriously asking, do we really need HTML5 to support a way of allowing authors and blogging engines to voluntarily tag sections as belonging to an article or just to a nav bar, then the answer is "hell yes", we certainly do if we want search engines to continue to work properly.
The "MS team" studying the HTML5 draft spec is supposed to already =know= stuff like this. They're representing a company that actually owns a major search engine, for crying out loud.
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Re:Video element is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, most people would like to see a browser without the need for plugins, so no Flash, no Silverlight/Mono. Just the browser doing all in a way that the page around it can actually interact with it properly. So you can rotate video's and take snapshots and apply filters for the blind. Or have proper hinting about what it is (an object-tag placed by a javscript on the page isn't very clear to a screen reader in comparison to a video-tag) and control by the blind, because the browser has control of the video.
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brace yourself.... (Score:3, Funny)
MSHTML 5 is coming.....
"We didnt like the standard so we improved on it"
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is worth noticing that MS seems to be the last to support a given standard, even once it's recognized as a standard -- they'd rather come out with their own competing "standard".
Case in point: OOXML. ODF works well, and could conceivably be extended to match the capabilities of MS Office. Instead, Microsoft launched a competing, far worse standard -- one nearly impossible for a competitor to implement completely -- and rammed it through Ecma and ISO so that it would be called a "standard", even if it cur
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Did a single MS browser except the Mac IE which runs a different engine support the stable standards of the day it was released without 'extending and embracing' it?
So are you claiming that Firefox/Netscape/etc have always been 100% standards compliant and furthermore, did not include any features that were NOT part of standards? Please clarify.
Do you call that poster fanboy? I call you a paid MS puppet.
Why would you call him a "paid MS puppet" ?
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.
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Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, does anyone other than a first time Windows user actaully use IE for serious/prolonged web sessions?
Between Firefox, Opera and Safari, is IE still being used to any great extent?
Re:Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Does anyone actually USE IE anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Haven't tracked HTML5... but... (Score:5, Insightful)
MS definitely did a poor job of tracking the standards effort. Getting changes they want is unlikely. There is definitely the appearance and likelihood of MS just trying to impede the standard because every other major browser producer is way ahead of them on HTML5, and the features contained therein are a huge threat to IE. If Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all support HTML5 and can give better video and interactive without Flash (and notably Silverlight), then Web devs may find it worth it to leave IE out of their support efforts to get out of having to use proprietary technologies with more cumbersome licensing circumstances.
That said, generally they have some points. Many of these tags to me seem analogous to ,, and similar tags from HTML that are widely regarded as a poor idea to use in the age of style sheets. The philosophy widely espoused with regard to modern web development is to separate content from presentation (much like much GUI application design philosophies). Many of the tags MS mentions seem to go against that design philosophy.
Some other criticisms are not along those lines (i.e. they don't question the validity of some tags, just if they are 'as valid' as other tags that could have been added with it. These criticisms seem a little more hollow at times without much substance.
Point of HTML (Score:5, Informative)
HTML is a markup language. It tells the browser "this is a paragraph" or "this is important".
Telling the browser that the top section of a website (Slashdot's tab bar) or the bottom (the search bar, quote, copyright, and links at the bottom) is exactly the sort of thing the browser should know. Screen readers would, in particular, benefit from this; most people don't need to hear the header or footer on every page.
Unnecessary? Sure - websites do fine without it. But telling the browser more about the page is a Good Thing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"header"/"footer" don't appear to indicate anything about printing that might reasonably be expected from those terms.
The word "arbitrary" seems to come from this line:
"aside" seems very arbitrary.
mindset ... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not sure that is the right thought process to be applying, given that HTML 5 is supposed to extend HTML 4.01 ... regardless
of the specific feature in question.
One hopes that's just a really rushed/broken edit artifact,
not a real reflection of what they think.
I could believe many of their comments are appropriate, but it's worrisome to see one like that escaping orbit.
Too many unrelated comments in one post (Score:4, Insightful)
Adrian Bateman did himself and his team a disservice by putting so many unrelated comments into a single post. Yes they are all related to HTML 5 but then again the mailing list itself is about HTML 5 so the context is set and individual posts should be scoped more narrowly. The end result is that the list lacks priority and appears that each of the comments/feedback sections have the same priority when they really do not.
They bring up some interesting thoughts about a few of the tags/implementations but these are lost in the general negativity of the post.
Additionally some of their comments seem to be focused on unrelated topics such as how the header and footer elements should be handled when printing... ??? as if they are expecting the header and footer to be placed at the top of each printed page in a multi-page print out of a web page. While interesting as a topic of discussion this should not be lumped in with other comments as it is obviously a very low priority for a specification dealing with digital media primarily.
Add to this that they had previously stated that the header and footer elements appear to be unnecessary and I as a reader am left wondering which statement is more important - either they are unnecessary or they are useful but not as useful unless they implement something to do with printing the document... pick a stance Adrian. You can't state conflicting opinions like this and hope to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion for Adrian Bateman is to break up your feedback into more narrowly scoped questions so that they can be responded to in the priority they deserve. I can only think that your intent was to force others to do this work for you and thereby discover what others felt were the priority items to discuss or to set off a generally chaotic discussion of issues and thereby create dissension within the group, bringing up old concerns that have been discussed at length long ago and resolved or agreed to already.
Re:Reasonable concerns, albeit late in the game (Score:4, Insightful)
The latest numbers I saw show MSIE of all versions combined at 66% where Firefox is over 25%. While Microsoft is still "the majority" by large amounts, this is not an election where only one winner is selected. Microsoft's position at the top isn't as significant at the size of the minority remainder which is about 34%. Long ago, when Microsoft commanded over 95%, nearly everything else was negligible. When it fell to 90%, developers started to take notice and to design for that 10% as well as for MSIE while some still remained MSIE only. But now the minority is too large to ignore. If you were running a business, would you feel comfortable alienating 5% of your customers? Maybe... but 10%? What about 33%? Ah, so you can see why MSIE's lead isn't as important a the size of the minority.
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