Re: Write-up about semantics in HTML5 from A List Apart

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>>> We are developing communications solutions for the timeframe of 
>>> decades.
>> While true, a solution that is always a decade away is not much use, 
>> though.
> 
> Also, while the solutions we're designing will almost certainly still be 
> in use decades from now, and will almost certainly influence the solutions 
> in use centuries from now, we are not actually designing the solutions for 
> the problems seen decades from now.
> 
> That is to say, we are trying to solve the problems of today and the next 
> few years, with a design that will be extensible in the future by the 
> maintainers of HTML once they know what the problems of the future are. 
> HTML5 is not the end of the road; when HTML5 is widely deployed and used, 
> then we will be able to design HTML6 on top of it. And so forth.
> 
> Thus there is no need for HTML5 to have author-usable features for 
> extensibility to solve the problems of decades from now. The extensibility 
> mechanisms for authors (and HMTL5 has many [1]) should solve _today's_ 
> problems; and the language should be designed in such a way that the 
> future maintainers of HTML can later extend the language to fix their 
> problems. This is just how HTML4 was done; it's how CSS was done; it's how 
> XML was done (you can't invent new XML syntax, for instance, that would 
> require a new version of XML).
> 
> [1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#HTML5_should_support_a_way_for_anyone_to_invent_new_elements.21
> 

Can anyone provide something like a big picture about HMTL5?

According to the article in wikipedia[1] HTML5 gives us so far:

Some new elements, more values for @type in input,
Formalization of parsing rules (that is simple a definition
of HTML5 grammar).

What does HTML5 change in principle (if it has to change anything)?
What we will tell to John the Plumber if he would ask us "why HTML5"?
What problems HTML5 solves now and what foundation it creates for future 
if to compare with HTML4?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html5

-- 
Andrew Fedoniouk.

http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 05:58:37 UTC