Becoming Friends with the HTML 5 Super Friends

Jens O. Meiert, September 30, 2009 / October 8, 2009.

This entry is filed under Web Development.

The HTML5 [sic] Super Friends are a few web designers and developers – not solely designers – who like to support and contribute to HTML 5.

Here’s my personal take on their initiative. Apply with a grain of salt.

It’s positive that the Super Friends recognize that HTML 5 will be important for the Web. Realizing this anytime before “2022” is great.

It’s interesting that the Super Friends’ Guide to HTML 5 lists, as one demand, a way to check for “quoted attributes, self-closed ~~empty~~ void elements, explicit closing tags, named entities, etc.” Fair enough, probably, unless that’s meant to be a vote for XHTML in which case data would be interesting that prove why not using (mostly) optional quotes around attribute values and not closing optional tags (in HTML) is a problem.

It’s beautiful that the Super Friends support the (interesting in its own right) decision to spell HTML 5 “HTML5”. This guidance seems to be beneficial to achieve consistency, as the guide then talks about “XHTML 1.0”, “XHTML1,” “HTML4,” and “html.”

Are there data for the “#body ‘taxonomy’”? (There is evidence for authors’ preference for class names like header and footer.)

It is just great that the Super Friends endorse sectioning and ARIA.

It is also great that the Super Friends expect trouble with placeholder links. While we’re at it, I guess we should ask to please clarify expected user agent behavior when activating <a href=""> and <a href="#"> too.

It might not be too great that the Super Friends forget to mention that HTML 5 (and CSS 3) will mean paradigm shifts for web development as we know it.

We’ll talk again –
a web developer contributing to HTML 5.

To be fair, the Super Friends do bring up some valid points and issues, some already influencing HTML 5 in one way or the other.

Update (October 9, 2009)

Another side of the story has been outlined in a Dilbert strip from 2005. Interestingly, that’s the same year in which first drafts for Web Applications 1.0 – the later HTML 5 – have been published.

Enjoy the most popular posts, possibly including:

Comments

On September 30, 2009, 19:48 CEST, Mike T. said:

May I ask why you’ve written [sic] next to HTML5? Apart from the title of the spec, I believe it is officially referred to as HTML5 throughout.
On September 30, 2009, 20:42 CEST, Rimantas said:

This „superfriends“ thing left pretty bad taste in my mouth.
I don’t remember seeing those (otherwise well known and some respected) names on whatwg mailing list, but suddenly they realize that their favorite xhtml-toy is not that shiny any more and come out with that pompous announcement.
While I applaud them joining in I do not like the way they did that.
On September 30, 2009, 21:35 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

Mike, indeed, yet a few people politely disagree.

Rimantas – you’re taking the words out of my mouth.
On October 1, 2009, 0:04 CEST, Neovov said:

What do you means in “paradigm shifts”? Is this related to the flow content model of HTML 5?

Jens Meiert