Yup.

This is what I refer to as following the *spirit* of the W3C standards. I keep things validating wherever I can, but if it’s some piece of invalid CSS3 that works and doesn’t break anything… why the hell not!

I wish this wasn’t spot-on, but it sure seems to be.

If the working groups did care about web users and less about their own petty issues we’d have chosen a format for the Video element instead of just allowed every browser to do their own, which makes it completely useless.

Personally, I wish they’d stop thinking in terms of versions. Why not just work to get bits right and then add to them? Why have version 5 when you can just have round whatever? The web doesn’t move forward in a solid wave, it bubbles forward like an ooze where some bits go faster than other bits and then they catch up or speed ahead. The web doesn’t move in versions; it moves in revisions.

A healthy dose of pragmatism from Mr Clarke. Don’t worry too much on the things are changing now, use what you can - and change it sometime later when it’s better to do it another way.

What I’m happy about is the tendency for browser makers to implement desired features such as box-shadow in a fairly standardized way. Even if they’re not part of the spec, we can use such features and implement basically the same way across all browsers that decide to support them. This doesn’t seem all that much different from the days when IE was throwing in random non-standard features completely differently from Netscape, but now most of the browser makers are the good guys. Perhaps the tables have turned.

John, silly implementations of technology will persist, to an extent, no matter how much that technology is governed. Even with the crazy Webkit animation possibilities, I don’t think we’ll go back to the time when blinking text was all the rage because we’ve grown past that. Yes, there will be abuse of CSS animations, oversight groups or not; I like to think that we, as a whole, know enough about communication on the web to use these kinds of technologies to supplement our messages.

It sometimes feels a little bit at the moment like “standards will eat themselves”. The Web standards has been of uncalculable benefit to the web community, and the web itself. The leaps and bounds we have taken over the past 7 or 8 years is astounding for exactly that reason.

It seems that somehow now we have become almost more interested in standards for standards sake, than the original reasoning for them in the first place. There will be naysayers who this post offends, thinking that spits on the heritage of standards and the good they have done.

I say Andy has a point. Standards are there to make life easier, both for us as designers, and for the end user.

Let’s do what we can when we can.

Spot on. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that the web will never be defined ahead of time by a spec. Consensus for that system is never going to happen. Instead, the browsers will continue throwing out new features, page authors will adopt a subset of them, and that subset will become the de facto standard. The useful specs will be the ones that are retroactive, and more of an attempt to record a snapshot of how the web was at some particular moment in time. The best we can do is just write for the web we want, and hope that one day the specs catch up.

@John—or even worse, tables and font tags.

I think Jason‘s got it right. Just because the technology enables something doesn’t mean it should be done. You don’t see red text on a green background, because we just know better at this point.

Powerful tools won’t stop those who are determined to do the wrong thing in every which way, but just because that’s a use case doesn’t mean we have to dumb down the tools themselves to prevent it from happening.

Your advice is sound, but your rationale seems cynical and oversimplified.  In the standards process, there are often conflicting goals, and sometimes bad faith politics, but just as often, there are people collaborating positively, and a large number of people volunteering their own time and energy (and a lot of it) to make sure the lives of users, developers, designers, and implementers easier.  Please don’t pretend their efforts are not genuine, nor that they don’t make a difference for the better.

There are disagreements, like there are with any group, but they will be worked out.  There’s actually a great deal of progress being made despite all that.  Many of these features will find their way into browsers soon; others will take longer to be implemented.  My advice if you don’t have time to engage with the creation of the standards is to pay attention to the many great sites that tell you what you can use today.  Using these features, filing bug reports with browsers, and talking about new features you need all help the progress of the Web.

I`d love to use HTML5 in my websites, but what to do with people who surf with devices that don`t feature a high-end browser like mobile devices, the PS3 or PSP, and are not capable of displaying HTML5?

They won`t see the site as intented, instead they will see a mess like peoble using IE to surf the web. That’s the strongest point for me why I still don`t use HTML5.

So far I’ve used CSS3 with at least two commercial projects and HTML 5 CSS3 on two personal (one which is commercial) projects and will continue to do so from now on. As yet no-one’s machine has imploded, it all works (even in IE6 shock horror) and frankly no-one (other than other web designers) has noticed.

So on short - it works, stop bitching. And yes it is acceptable to use JavaScript for most things. For those that don’t have it enabled? Just make sure they can still access the content, even if it doesn’t look as pretty as the “real thing”.

Andy, you are advocating Tag Soup. Yes, nobody will die from this. However, this practice makes it more difficult for tool vendors to process HTML which increases their costs and creates an uncompetitive environment.

Andy, I understand your point, but I completely agree with Vlad Alexander statement when he says that, at the end, you are advocating tag soup. No more no less.

We’ve reached the 2.0 era thanks to the stability provided by standards. It took several years, but it worked finally. The main threat during this time of peace and stability (i.e. development and innovation) was IE monster, but even that ugly huge monster was defeated with the standards weapon in hand.

Nobody dies if you, Andy Clarke, or any other expert designer, experiment with new ideas or new standards proposals. Quite the opposite. But the idea of encouraging designers in general to start working with non-standards, as if we were in a complete experimental era, is very dangerous.

We’ve spent years complaining about the troubles cased by MS and its obstinacy of doing things at their own. We can’t let the same to happen again, with different actors, but the same again. Now that the consortium is in a very weak position, we can’t let browser developers believe that we, web developers, are very happy to receive a BWII.

And we just can’t be so naive to think: “Oh, no, we just learned from the past, we are ready now, that won’t happen again ...” (*)

(*) See history of humanity.

I don’t agree that corporations acting in their own selfish interests are necessarily bad. Each major player in the browser development market has a vested interest in a different segment of the market; MS targets the corporate world and intranets, Apple targets consumers and embedded devices, Opera targets mobile and embedded devices, Firefox targets regular consumers.

The net effect is that no matter what kind of sites we’re hoping to build (be them rich web applications, intranet portals or standard client websites) there’s a member of the WG that’s got your back (tangentially).

I do agree that it’s in our own best interests to start putting these HTML5 extensions in place in ways that degrade gracefully (things like CSS columns, @font-face, box-shadow) since in general the standard weights more heavily those technologies that can be shown to be in use on the web.

Andy, you just wrote that you “are all about writing the best, most minimal hardboiled markup possible”. However, the markup on your own web site speaks to the contrary!

It’s difficult to tolerate you standing on a soapbox writing about good markup while your own code is still absymal. If you cannot write HTML4 correctly after all these years I hardly think that you’re in a position to wax eloquent about using CSS3 along with HTML5.

For reference, I am looking at this blog post from forabeautifulweb.com. Please open the source code. Head down to #comment_form and review the markup used on this form.

FIELDSETs are used for grouping relevant batches of inputs in a form. You are abusing them by using them for form layout, and using superfluous FIELDSETs around single inputs. Using them in the manner you are is both incorrect and jarring to the user, since you are violating the left-to-right tab index principle of least surprise. Tab through the form. See what I mean? Anyways, since all of these inputs are closely related (as the whole form is for a single comment) they should all be contained within a single FIELDSET. You might even add in a LEGEND element if you were so inclined.

Further tag soup: Why is there a DIV around hidden inputs? They’re, well, hidden. Why not use a UL with left-floated LIs for the first 4 fields of the form, as that would preserve a sane tab index along with removing reducing the overall markup necessary for the simple layout? (And cleaning up your CSS, which is a whole separate can of worms) Why not make the LABELs block instead of using BRs throughout?

Adding a gimmicky transparency effect to your form inputs does not mask the fact that the underlying markup has been constructed poorly. This isn’t advanced stuff here. One ought to learn how to write proper HTML4 before starting to use HTML5, in my not-entirely-humble opinion.

Alex, why are you attacking Andy to begin with; like you have a personal vendetta against him or something. Get an life in your anonymous world.

Andy, your advice is wise and straight the point as usual.

Up front disclosure: I am an invited expert on both the W3C CSS and HTML working groups, a community manager/admin at microformats.org, and on the elected board of the Open Web Foundation (OWF).

I think the apparent “corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements” (your words) that you and/or others are observing is more a result of the much greater transparency of the HTML5 effort rather than anything unique to HTML5 at W3C.

The previous several revisions of HTML (including XHTML) were largely developed in W3C Members-Only mailing lists (and face-to-face meetings) which contained a lot of similar “corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements” - however such tussles were *invisible* to search engines, the general public, and of course all the professional web developers and designers (like yourself) - you never saw how the sausage was made as it were.  I know this because I *was* there for many years (as an official W3C representative from Microsoft).

So yes, when open standards work is done *so much more* in the open (fully archived and indexed public blog/wiki/IRC/lists, very few face-to-face meetings) both (a) it’s much easier to see some of the intermediate conflicts that occur (that would have typically otherwise been resolved behind closed doors), and (b) (and this is the part that I actually worry about) any public discussion attracts some amount of “detractor performants” (I really am trying to reduce the use of the term “troll”) who have more time to write and send (often lengthy/crazy) email/proposals/bugs than those of us who actually spend most of our day *building* the web. And frankly, W3C has never been very good at dealing with such detractor performants - community management and all that. I myself quit the public www-style and www-html lists because they have become overrun (IMHO) with that kind of unrestrained unproductive traffic.

Overall I *do* think the positives from more open standards development (like that for HTML5, or microformats for that matter) do outweigh the negatives.

It does require a new set of skills however, as a participant (don’t respond/feed the trolls), as a community manager (actively set/refine guidelines and promptly kick out those disrupting for disruptions’s sake), or as an observer (be aware that you are reading raw conversations and they will be messy - keep calm - as you say :).

I hope that helps put some of the current conflicts into a better (more optimistic) context, and encourage you to continue keeping up with HTML5 and filtering it accordingly for your audiences.

In return I promise to keep listening to you and to all other active professional web designers/developers who build the web, and do my best to incorporate that input and those opinions into the work I do on open web standards, in W3C, microformats, and the OWF.

Sincerely,

Tantek

One thing that all the cutting edge designers and boutique shops keep forgetting is that this wonderful thing we know as the ‘web’ (complete with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and all the newly emerging goodies of HTML5) is also used in the most mundane of ways, on web sites that simply need to communicate information to the end user without being a showcase of CSS mastery, Ajaxian trickery or the cutting edge coding examples of <canvas>, <video>, etc., etc.

No, these organizations are themselves large, lumbering beasts, lacking the agility, flexibility and luxury to push the envelope and explore the fringes. The poor folk who work there instead have to rely on and comply to STANDARDS, not specifications that shift like sand in the desert, but codified, nailed down, no-way-but-this-way STANDARDS. Academia, Governance, heck even large Corporate sites all have to meet Standards requirements to conform to a slew of trivial things like laws, shareholders, marketing and branding, and a whole raft of things that talented and exciting boutiques get to challenge.  Work for a government agency? Good luck challenging anything my friend.  Heck, in some areas of development ‘webmasters’ are union jobs, complete with scheduled morning and afternoon breaks, an hour for lunch, start at 8, finish at 5. I work for one such large organisation, and I know of what I speak - it might not be as bad as some other locations (and I do get to try out cool new stuff), but I’ve also met and commiserated with others even less fortunate than I more than once.

Yes, it’s sad; I hear you muttering, “I’d never do that, I do art”. Reality check #2 - not everyone gets to be Andy Clarke (or Dave Shea, or Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çelik, Wendy Chisholm, Aaron Gustafson, Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte, Eric Meyer, Nicole Sullivan or Jeffrey Zeldman - the Superfriends), nope, instead they have J-O-B Jobs, and mortgages, groceries, two kids in high school and a retirement portfolio that is still too weak to allow retirement at age 55.  For them, STANDARDS are the tool-set that they must use, and so Standards are important.

Standards are more than just specifications.  Standards are translated into numerous languages, printed with actual paper & ink in books (which are sold in shops, stored in libraries and used as teaching materials in schools), combed over by legal folk, management folk, and other stake holders who might not know a CSS child-element from a JSON call, but they do know what ‘broken’ means, and for them, ‘broken’ can sometimes mean big trouble: law suits, lost business, bad press and on and on. There is no room in a STANDARD for “...fix-it-in-the-mix” mentality, for “...we’ll get to that in the next iteration”.  Nope, Standards are, by necessity, solid as the rock of Gibraltar, and often just as exciting. Specs? They can be exciting, inventive, invigorating and challenging. Specs alone however cannot be Standards, not until they’ve also traveled down the political road of poking and prodding from all the stakeholders, not just the artisans and technologists.

Believe it or not, the W3C is the best collection of people who understand these issues; they have representation from all those other stakeholders, yet those representatives can also speak to the technology that is driving this all, both the tried and true, but also the new and exciting.  Smaller groups, perhaps looser in structure and smaller in size (I’m pointing at you WHAT WG) might appear to be faster, nimbler, and more ‘with it’, but that’s only because they lack the perspective and insights that the larger organization can contribute.  As a vocal accessibility advocate, all I need do is point to <canvas>, and last years Bespin experiment - yes, cool, but yet totally inaccessible, because, guess what, the spec never accounted for accessibility; the drafters either forgot or ignored that important part of the puzzle. The expertise inside of the W3C however is now working on this boring but critical part of the specification; the original authors long since moving on to other experimental bits like (oh, say) Microdata…

Anyway, to you, the edgy young professional who currently has the dream web job, not the mortgage J-O-B : take heart, this will work itself out.  Saner voices will win the day, HTML5 will be the next Standard, and in 3 years time this will all be a past nightmare, just like the Browser Wars of the late ‘90s.  But at the same time remember, the W3C is not stalling anything, but rather they are ensuring that all this cool stuff can be used by everyone: end users, cutting edge boutique developers like Mr. Clarke, and our poor beleaguered civil servant, currently on his prescribed 15 minute break in the cafeteria (or out back in the loading dock, grabbing a quick smoke).  And think twice about what STANDARDS really mean.

Peace!

Andy, sorry for saying that in some way you are advocating tag soup. Of course don’t take it literally (please! I admire so much your work!) :-) I expressed myself wrong.

I insist in that I’ve understood your point. You are the only responsible of your work. Nothing happens if you want to use elements, attributes or properties defined just in specs currently on-work (mature or not). But you should be aware than you play a role as a guru of web design and that means responsability. Like it or not! Your words can be misunderstand easily as a call against standards.

In this time of doubts there are a lot of people that suddenly are following a trend against standards (those that we used to love) and specially against w3c, and what w3c represents (Haven’t you ever been called ‘standarista’?). And I think that we should not provide arguments at all to them.

I’ve been saying for years that w3c is the UN of web. You can complain about their slowness and their lack of efficiency. You have to criticize them, when needed. You can make all the jokes you want about them. But you have to support them both. It’s not an easy nor an appreciated work what they have to do: improve things while keeping everybody happy. EVERYBODY. Final users included, of course.

You have been involved with w3c so you know very much about how difficult it must be.

But we need a strong w3c because we need STANDARDS as has perfectly explained John Foliot in his ‘get real’.

I also think that complexity of developing standards is in fact exponential in sucesive new versions, as they rely on bigger and more complex versions (even on other new standards or new concerns) each time. It’s not an excuse. It’s a fact. And that fact must be taken in consideration as there are no shortcuts to avoid that complexity, other than ignoring parts of the already known, which is a not very inteligent way of “improving” things.

Shall we wait then for a so slow organisation and a so slow process? I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, it deppends on the quality of the final results we want.

I’m not saying that we should passively wait. It has been proved that some of the best ideas come from outside and that a small revolution outside can perfectly awake the apparently aslept dinosaur.

But that doesn’t mean that is a good idea that the revolution takes the lead of all it, as it has happen. And less is a good idea that, meanwhile, while everything comes to a normality we should carry on making things worse, giving power to browser developers to start a second browser war or a cold browser war.

When I started my web development experience I followed HTML4 and CSS1-2 standards and this was enough for making small pretty web pages. To make my code approved by W3C validation I turned to XHTML1.0 approach. I hoped my code would be perfect. I dealt with XML during my projects and share that semantic web is a pretty good idea.

Now we are speaking about HTML5 and XHTML2.0 support. We can treat these as progress and upgrade but can consider it as making noise news. Because nowadays practice proves: it’s possible to code without these new standards, and the only necessity to accept these innovations is an awareness to be punished by future validation tools.

In any case HTML5 requires a very great promotion to be proved as the true convenient tool for web site building.

@ Dave S. - I apologize if it appeared that I was suggesting that you were part of the Superfriends - although your work and contributions to our industry are equal to those on the signatory list, and I tip my hat to you in respect. I added your name to that list as you had commented earlier on this thread, nothing more.

@Andy - While academic & corporate web folks went home 4 hours ago, in the REAL world (after a 6 hour client meeting), I still have 4 hours to work (http://twitter.com/Malarkey/status/7724278911)

Why do you say that?

I was going to have a rant at that rediculous comment but, again, Mr. Folio is alot more measured - (http://john.foliot.ca/standards-are-not-just-stuff-and-nonesense/#comment-72)

“Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

Hi Andy,

I was recently tasked with researching the HTML(5) with a mind to developing a video site for a client the could not be more conservative: at heart I’m a libertarian and working for this client will take a lot of heart searching, but I could be working in the experimantal sphere so I have to put aside my particular sensitivities I guess. BTW, I say could, because in all likely hood, again, our creative department may go the flash root again…the path of least resistence, apparently.

Jeez, on my current project the App Devs have estimated 4-6 weeks to make [a]

[a][/a]

- perhaps I should tell them about HTML(5) ;)

BTW, “Standards should inform what you do, never define it.”, is that a sponsored by Microsoft slogan?

Could you be more transparent about what you mean by “In the CSS Working Group (which I still follow even though I’m no longer an Invited Expert), Microsoft’s hitherto lack of progressiveness hints at their concern of adversely affecting corporate enterprise, their core business.”?  I honestly don’t understand.