I’m excited about the recent release of the Web browser standards test Acid3. Now lets encourage the browsers to do it. Sounds like the WebKit crew is already working on it, which is awesome. What about Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Opera?
There was a lot of big news today in the world of Web standards. Today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public working draft of HTML 5. It’s the next generation of thinking around the future of HTML, which is the lingua franca or building blocks of every Web site.
Some of HTML 5 is great… some of its meh… but it’s a start, which is AWESOME.
Yes, just to be clear… HTML 5 is far from done. If you follow the timeline set forth by the chairs of the working group who have taken up this endeavor, this may be wrapping up in 2010.
But… what this first public working draft is is hopefully a starting point of even more community discussion and participating in what will be the future of the Web.
Now, just to warn you. The HTML 5 specification draft is pretty heavy… as in the language is tough and if you were to print it off and drop it on your toe, you’d probably break your toe. The main audience of the spec is browser makers (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, etc.)
If you wanna work your way up to reading the spec, I’d recommend checking out the document “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4” which was also released today for first public working draft by the W3C. You could also check out the A List Apart article written by Lachlan Hunt, “A Preview of HTML 5.“
Even though plenty of people have already written about this, I wanted to pass on my congratulations to the Microsoft Internet Explorer team for passing the Acid2 test on their recent internal build of Internet Explorer 8. I realize that is a big achievement and they should be congratulated.
I have been on the W3C HTML Working group for about a month now. The big initiative we’re working on is the development of HTML 5.
Since I joined the working group, I’ve been out there talking with people, listening to folks, reading comments, and reading blogs. Noted JavaScript expert Jeremy Keith summed up a common collective feeling that i’ve heard so much from people…
The present isn’t that bad. HTML is good enough.
I really think that complacency is one of the biggest enemies of HTML 5.
People generally don’t know what’s wrong with HTML 4 or why HTML 5 is better so they don’t pay attention or get involved.
The thing is we need HTML 5. The Web and how the world uses the Web has changed a lot since HTML 4. More on this later…
CNET TV has recently shown a great deal of leadership in the online video space by starting to provide captions for their video. This is great news! I know it’s not easy to caption video… this is a big move for them. I hope more video shops (like Revision 3) will follow their move and start providing captions.
There is a chunk of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 that deals with captioning. Success Criteria 1.2.1 says…
1.2.1 Captions (Prerecorded): Captions are provided for prerecorded synchronized media, except if the synchronized media is an alternative to text and is clearly labeled as such . (Level A)
Shawn Henry of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative recently wrote a blog post entitled “Is WCAG 2.0 almost done?!” Well after reading the document, I say let’s advance the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to it’s next stage.
Like Shawn, I’ve been following the development of WCAG 2.0 for a while and I think that this is one of the working group strongest drafts yet.
I’m going to start using WCAG 2.0 when making Web sites. Will you join me?
Well today the World Wide Web Consortium has just published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as a Last Call Working Draft. For those of us who’ve followed the development of WCAG 2.0, getting things to this stage is definitely a long time coming and we’re all very excited to see what the WCAG Working Group has come up with.
According to the WAI document “How WAI Develops Accessibility Guidelines through the W3C Process…“, Last Call Working Draft means the following:
When a Working Group believes it has addressed all comments and technical requirements, it provides the complete document for community review and announces the Last Call. For example, see the WCAG 2.0 Last Call Announcement and Extention e-mail. (Note that after the Last Call comment period, it can take weeks or months for a Working Group to formally address all comments, document the resolutions, and make necessary changes.) If there are substantive changes, the technical report would go through another Last Call Working Draft before moving to the next stage.
According to the Call for Review, “The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.”
Sweet!
If you’re going to review WCAG 2.0, make sure that you also check out the following updated documents…
I’m going to be doing a detailed review of WCAG 2.0. I’ll be publishing my thoughts here as soon as I get time to sit down with the document.
Stay tuned…
Yesterday, W3C HTML Working Group member Lachlan Hunt had an article published in the Web magazine A List Apart called “A Preview of HTML 5, which you all should read.
It covers some of the new features in HTML 5 like the header, nav, and footer tags. It also touched on the video and audio tags and how Opera and Apple are already experimenting with how they’d implement them.
If anything, I think the article is a sort of “call to action”. If we want to make HTML 5 a reality then it needs to be a community effort. It can’t just be a few folks in the working group. The HTML Working Group needs your help.
Do you think we need a new version of HTML? What features would you want to see in it?
Do the features that are currently listed in the spec make sense or do they have the potential to be abused or misused as much as what’s layed out in HTML 4? (I guess we won’t know the answer to this question until its implemented.)
Read the article and please share your thoughts.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the language of the World Wide Web but it’s been a while since it’s been updated to where the world is today. At the W3C, there is a working group which is looking at the future of HTML.
As we move forward, there needs to be a set of principles which guides the decisions we make. This is why the HTML Working Group published a first public working draft of the HTML Design Principles.
Here’s my summary and translation…
Was anything missed? The HTML Working Group needs your feedback.
One W3C concept which I didn’t fully wrap my head around till recently is the idea of a test suite. It is a set of files that each test a certain property or aspect of a specification (… being things like HTML, CSS, or SVG).
For example, there could be a test which makes sure that a browser can render bold text correctly. That’s all it’d do. You’d view the file in the browser and you can quickly tell that whether the browser passed or failed.
There are a bunch of test suites…
Test suites are important so that you can test that the specification was implemented properly. What good is a spec unless it’s been implemented somewhere and implemented consistently?
