# Thinking about HTML5 a bit more
technological @ 26 October 2007
Some of you readers may remember me making a post about HTML5 - its available here
I am have been thinking about it recently. I am not going to take back the things I said about it before, but I wanted to add some suggestions.
To the guys developing the spec:-
If you really want HTML5 to succeed then it is absolutely necessary that you:
- Really push the standard and adhering to validity. Validity is the key, without validity then that makes things awkward to parse and therefore harder for the search engines and screenscrapers
- Must create validation tools and parser libraries
- Push XHTML5 just as much as you push HTML5 - which will allow parsing/validation from both HTML5 parsers/validators and XML parsers/validators…. we then have bonus points.
I ask the above of you because I am a great believer in semantic code - code that gives meaning. To win with the standard; you are first going to have to win over the techies/researchers then you can try to win over the users. I also want to be able to embed RDFa and/or Microformats into my XHTML5 too, so if you can make that possible then I am willing to work with you on HTML5.
Many thanks,
Daniel
October 26th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
There are people working on validators and parser libraries for HTML5, but in general, this is an open community: if you think something needs to happen, join us and do it!
As far as pushing is concerned, I don’t believe we should push standards. If they’re good, people will promote them of their own accord. If they suck, we deserve to not get any uptake. Pushing standards tends to result in what happened with XHTML1 — people want to follow it because it’s the latest hot thing, and so they claim to follow it, but they fail to actually do it (wrong MIME type), fail to do it right (much invalid XHTML), and fail to get any of the theoretical benefits (XML parsers don’t end up getting used).