[A summary of things I feel about HTML5, from a sleep-deprived mind]
It feels like it should be much later... earlier... than that. I’ve spent hours and hours reading debates about HTML5. Mostly debates in the comments of blog posts and articles. I feel fairly well versed in two sides of the argument, the nature of which boils down to “HTML5: What is the point?”.
My personal view is that progression is good. Development for the sake of development is good. Even if you don’t get it right the first time, at least you’re doing something, and not just whining about it. Someone (yeah, someone important, I don’t do citations at this time in the morning) said that HTML5 was being developed for the present, and that it will be rewritten in the future, to meet the needs in the future. Lots of people had a problem with that concept, as we should be developing for the future. Lots of people supported that concept, as predicting the future is quite a challenge. I haven’t decided where I stand yet. Maybe I don’t need to.
I like the fact things are changing, because it makes me feel excited and challenged and all that. It upsets me a little that I’d just got the hang of all this web development malarky, and now there’s more?! Lots of people seem to feel the same about the latter. Which is understandable. Understandable in a world where the web is expected to be a fixed thing, and you make a website, and it works, and customers are happy, and clients are happy, and it stays like that forever. But the world and the web (and customers and clients) are fluid and flowing and flexible and fickle. Peoples’ needs change, hardware changes, software changes, businesses change. They always have, and always will, so where this idea that the web should whoa slow down a second and wait for the slower ones to catch up has come from, I’m not quite sure.
This makes it sound like HTML5 appeared overnight. Which for me, in a way, it did. Appeared to my conscious, concentrating, information-absorbing mind, anyway.
But the part where the HTML5 spec has been under development for like six years or something now? Come on guys. I know it’s not easy, but really. Give the lazy people something to complain about. Or at least make a big deal out of it from the start. So ‘they’ can start thinking about it from the get-go. Maybe a big deal was made, and I just missed it. But I was making websites six years ago, just. So if I missed it, ‘they’ did too.
That last paragraph went a bit to the dogs. What I’m trying to say is: the little man on the ground, the guy making the websites day-to-day, the guy dabbling, the guy fouling up the standard mark-up you hold so dear... Tell him what you’re doing, as you’re doing it, so he’s prepared.
I know you can’t force change. Hell, outside of term time I still live under a regime where IE6 is deemed a perfectly adequate browser, installing Chrome ‘breaks’ IE, so isn’t allowed, and [insert new web thing since 1997] might be a great feature, but since my father doesn’t explicitly use it, any development on that front is pointless. Hey, he even (almost daily) states angrily that film making companies are at fault because their productions are shown letterboxed on his 4:3 TV. (I just searched so I could state that widescreen TVs have been commonplace since [year], and discovered that films have been being made in widescreen since around 1929. HAH. I’ll quote that juicy fact next time). But this is whole other blog post.
I was going somewhere with this. Oh yes.
I still don’t know whether I can put a <nav> in a <header>.
That’s all I was trying to find out when I stumbled across the various debates.
I’m officially declaring the HTML5 spec subject to interpretation.
And I’m putting the <nav> in the <header>. It’s part of the header of the page. In this particular context, if I had a div with id header, I’d put the navigation inside it. To hell with you all.
PS. Thanks for the great work on developing HTML5, guys. My life would be dull and repetitive without the likes of you; I’d be reading and writing a lot more fiction, and spending far more time with my family. Much obliged.
My personal view is that progression is good. Development for the sake of development is good. Even if you don’t get it right the first time, at least you’re doing something, and not just whining about it. Someone (yeah, someone important, I don’t do citations at this time in the morning) said that HTML5 was being developed for the present, and that it will be rewritten in the future, to meet the needs in the future. Lots of people had a problem with that concept, as we should be developing for the future. Lots of people supported that concept, as predicting the future is quite a challenge. I haven’t decided where I stand yet. Maybe I don’t need to.
I like the fact things are changing, because it makes me feel excited and challenged and all that. It upsets me a little that I’d just got the hang of all this web development malarky, and now there’s more?! Lots of people seem to feel the same about the latter. Which is understandable. Understandable in a world where the web is expected to be a fixed thing, and you make a website, and it works, and customers are happy, and clients are happy, and it stays like that forever. But the world and the web (and customers and clients) are fluid and flowing and flexible and fickle. Peoples’ needs change, hardware changes, software changes, businesses change. They always have, and always will, so where this idea that the web should whoa slow down a second and wait for the slower ones to catch up has come from, I’m not quite sure.
This makes it sound like HTML5 appeared overnight. Which for me, in a way, it did. Appeared to my conscious, concentrating, information-absorbing mind, anyway.
But the part where the HTML5 spec has been under development for like six years or something now? Come on guys. I know it’s not easy, but really. Give the lazy people something to complain about. Or at least make a big deal out of it from the start. So ‘they’ can start thinking about it from the get-go. Maybe a big deal was made, and I just missed it. But I was making websites six years ago, just. So if I missed it, ‘they’ did too.
That last paragraph went a bit to the dogs. What I’m trying to say is: the little man on the ground, the guy making the websites day-to-day, the guy dabbling, the guy fouling up the standard mark-up you hold so dear... Tell him what you’re doing, as you’re doing it, so he’s prepared.
I know you can’t force change. Hell, outside of term time I still live under a regime where IE6 is deemed a perfectly adequate browser, installing Chrome ‘breaks’ IE, so isn’t allowed, and [insert new web thing since 1997] might be a great feature, but since my father doesn’t explicitly use it, any development on that front is pointless. Hey, he even (almost daily) states angrily that film making companies are at fault because their productions are shown letterboxed on his 4:3 TV. (I just searched so I could state that widescreen TVs have been commonplace since [year], and discovered that films have been being made in widescreen since around 1929. HAH. I’ll quote that juicy fact next time). But this is whole other blog post.
I was going somewhere with this. Oh yes.
I still don’t know whether I can put a <nav> in a <header>.
That’s all I was trying to find out when I stumbled across the various debates.
I’m officially declaring the HTML5 spec subject to interpretation.
And I’m putting the <nav> in the <header>. It’s part of the header of the page. In this particular context, if I had a div with id header, I’d put the navigation inside it. To hell with you all.
PS. Thanks for the great work on developing HTML5, guys. My life would be dull and repetitive without the likes of you; I’d be reading and writing a lot more fiction, and spending far more time with my family. Much obliged.
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