A day or so ago, Adrian Bateman, from Microsoft’s IE team, posted his team’s thoughts on the current draft of the HTML5 spec.
Reading it is brutal. Bateman takes issue with basically everything added since HTML4. He goes through and individually criticizes many of the new tags, sometimes with extremely detailed, multi-paragraph critiques. I guess this is what happens when you’re not sufficiently involved at the beginning.
Of course, there is still plenty of time to complain, since the HTML5 spec won’t reach its final stage until 2022.
Bateman and the IE team, even while sounding like they don’t even want HTML5, do bring up a few things that have been bothering me about the spec.
Let me be very clear: I think new tags like <audio> and <video> are wonderful. Breaking the Adobe monopoly is great. There are still some issues (refusing to specify a codec meaning you can’t build support into the browser, for instance) but those types of tags are going to help push the web to a better place.
The parts that bother me are the new, highly touted “structural” tags, like <header>, <footer>, <section>, and worst, <article> and <aside>. Read the rest of this entry »