Roger Johansson notes that HTML 5 compliant browsers will treat all content served as text/html with the HTML 5 specification. And this means that all of today’s HTML and most of XHTML will be HTML 5. Of course, this is what W3C wants. Usually the browser and web development vendors have something else in mind. They are too busy with their own runtimes to comply with the W3C specifications. At least this time vendors seem to be inline with W3C this time, rather than supporting their own dialects.
Sam Ruby takes a shot at the future and finds the worst case scenario when browsers will be dependent on one closed-source plugin that will render all content. I wonder if it is a good thing that the whole rich internet applications scenario is pushing us away from the standard rendering specification (X/HTML) towards multiple proprietary runtimes influnced by vendors and their businesses. Of course there are some good actions, but they are still lost in the war of formats and market shares.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
> I wonder if it is a good thing that the whole rich internet applications scenario is pushing us away from the standard rendering specification (X/HTML) towards multiple proprietary runtimes influnced by vendors and their businesses.
Could it be the result of standard bodies such as the W3C to take so long to produce better alternatives in the first place ? I’m not necessarily pro-WHATWG but they had a good attitude by saying “screw it, we will never get anywhere with the W3C, let’s make things happen”.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Yes, I too feel that W3C is a bit late with the action. The runtimes have to be considered somewhere by the standards body.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Sylvain, the players in the what wg are all in the HTML WG…