Joe Clark on Horses and HTML 5
Joe Clark’s latest post titled They shoot standardistas, don’t they? is a modified movie title I often quote to my partner - They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (a synopsis explains the storyline). The title got me reading his article immediately.
I thoroughly agree with Joe regarding his sentiments about HTML 5 as you could tell from my tongue in cheek post The Solution is a HTML 5 Apathetic Doctype which I republished as Is HTML 5 Apathetic your Cup of Tea? in November. In my view HTML 5 isn’t worth talking about and if you’re going to dumb it down to meet case studies like Flickr then there are serious issues underlying the whole mentality of the process. Ultimately we could dumb it all down so that every college student with a MySpace account or any Primary School child with a retro-copy of FrontPage could still validate as perfect HTML 5. Yes I’m probably labouring the point with crap examples but its pretty much how I see this one going down. Why not make it valid to put form tags around an entire page just because there’s a login in there somewhere as that’s apparently a bad practice prevalent in some environments?
Font should have been shot and a bill for the bullet sent to its next of kin REGARDLESS of whatever comic the working group were reading at the time. Font sucks as an iconic figure in markup.
In the end for all the egos and specification perfectionists in the world of HTML 5 it all has to work eventually in the real world for me. Not only that but they fail to see that it needs to be marketed to me. And you. Just like any other business process or product out there. I really do get the feeling that these people are just creating something and somehow expecting us to all be so amazed that we’ll instantly recognise its beauty and wisdom and adopt it like a lost child. Think again.
If its irrelevant. If it doesn’t transition easily. If it fails to provide accessibility features then it will to some extent fail. In business, as in life, people need a reason to progress away from their comfort zone and if HTML 5 doesn’t successfully market to us then I can’t see it being much of anything. Regardless of the statements of some oversmart honchos on the working group.
Joe’s words cut right to the issue…
We have to keep font because shitty content-management systems still use it, but we can get rid of useful accessibility elements and attributes because equally shitty adaptive technologies do not use them.Joe Clark
Its that compromise that I believe will sink the HTML 5 ship eventually. That and death by committee with a benevolent dictator. I may be wrong but in time we’ll tell exactly how significant the HTML 5 bandwagon really becomes (or not). I’m starting to hope (tongue in cheek) we get fully accessible Flash and other technologies by that time so HTML 5 will become a moot point. Remembered in history as a debacle of grandoise self promotion by several experts competing to become legends in their mother’s spare bedroom. There’s probably a little truth in that insult too.
Sorry HTML 5… half a star for appearing at the theatre. Unlike They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? which gets four stars for its era and made me think extensively over a couple of decades about the nature of life and man’s malleable humanity in crisis.
January 5th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Ah yes, HTML5!
I’m expecting a lot more online talk, mud-slinging and such, about HTML5 in 2008 before we ever see it amount to much more than ‘HTML4 with bells on it!’
Joe’s article is (in typical Joe style) a no-nonsense and concise statement of why he’s not impressed with HTML5…and why the current technologies, if used correctly, would be sufficient for most requirements. Good to see some people have their head screwed-on eh?
January 5th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Jeremy Keith’s Year Zero article from yesterday has a couple of sentences that are highly relevent.
I’m of the same mind. What’s wrong with just fixing some of the shitty parts of HTML 4 and moving forward? I’m reasonably happy with what I have but would like some improvement. Not a revolutionary change as such.
To be honest I don’t entirely think the future is cut and dried about how important HTML 5 will be in 5, 10 or even 15 years Matt. Superfast bandwidth, changes in science and technology, mobile technologies etc… the working group are just one silo in a world of even smarter people. I’d like to see a second Internet infrastructure developed, for example, using modern protocols which could stamp out spam, kiddie porn and nigerian scamming etc… the free to air web would still exist but commercially we’re running all this on top of 30 year old stuff… eventually that will become 40, 50 and 60 year technologies. Obviously the Internet as we know it, and therefore the web, will evolve or die like any organism. Unfortunately there’s an osterich paradigm at play where nearly everyone expects this to be exactly the same in 10 - 15 years as today only with HTML 5. That, to me, makes no sense.
It makes more sense to just incrementally improve HTML 4 and even XHTML 1 so that things work as we progress. So Jeremy’s words struck a chord.
But mostly I have taken it on board that HTML 5 is not about me at all. Its about several well known individuals who want to be remembered as the mavericks who carved a new specification. Legends in their own bedroom. They have their own agenda and accessibility for one isn’t in there because to them its a crock of shit. Much better to placate Flickr case studies
Still, if I wind up in 2020 working with a fully functional HTML 5 that does everything they want it also BETTER do everything I want. That’s what they need to understand. Because there will be other options at that stage… OK rant ended lol… sorry…
The world is bigger than HTML 5.
January 5th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Good follow-up reply mate!