Saturday, 2 April 2011

HTML 5 has a serious flaw

HTML 5 is long overdue, after the WWW Consortium's failed attempt at convincing us to use XHTML. It has many useful features, but one glaring fault: it has discarded version control. I've been writing and designing distributed systems for over twenty years, and one thing has become very clear: if you don't include version numbers in your protocol then you are asking for trouble.

The document type has been simplified. Before it used to have horrible things like 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

But now it has been simplified overmuch to just

<!DOCTYPE html>
There are some people who like this (e.g. John Resig). But I don't. HTML will continue to evolve - there will be new tags and attributes, and the existing behaviour will be clarified or changed. But without a version number, how will a browser (or any user agent) be able to work out which version it is dealing with? And how can a content generator signal which version it is creating? Already there is considerable confusion about which bits of HTML 5 are supported by different browsers.

The simple answer is perhaps that this allows vendors free reign to do what they want - and we saw what a mess that caused before HTML 4 put a standard in the ground. There is still time for the WWW Consortium to fix at least this one error before it is too late.
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2 comments:

  1. Radek Skokan3 May 2012 at 12:17

    That also came to my mind when I was checking what HTML 5 is all about.
    But as long as HTML interpreters (browsers) are backward compatible, there should be no issue I guess.

    I feel it's not puristic, but anyway, HTML aims for practicality.

    Cheers,
    Radek

    ReplyDelete
  2. efs15 June 2012 at 06:15

    if there is no version number then it is version 5

    ReplyDelete

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