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Microsoft: break up HTML 5


By David Worthington
April 22, 2008 — 
The ever-increasing intricacy of the World Wide Web is evidenced by the character and scope of the HTML 5 draft specification. Microsoft wants to hasten HTML 5’s arrival, but its proposed solution may not sit well with all parties.

In a recent interview, Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson told SD Times that more progress could be made with teams working in parallel, and he recommended that portions of the HTML 5 specification be broken off and assigned to new workgroups.

That might not be as radical as it sounds, according to Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, who believes that it makes sense to subdivide HTML 5 into smaller, more manageable pieces. “I can’t even imagine how many years it will take browsers to implement it [HTML 5].” Hammond posited, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Wilson explained that several pieces of HTML 5 would be equally useful outside of it, particularly for Web applications and content. Those bits include such features as the Canvas APIs, which are used to render moving graphics; offline caching of Web applications' resources; persistent client-side data storage; and the peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework.

Hammond noted that examples of those technologies are already prospering outside of HTML, such as local storage in Google Gears, and to him, the popularity of technologies like Flash and Silverlight demonstrates that there is a demand for the Canvas APIs. “These two in particular make a lot of sense to me … to split off from the larger specification and move [HTML 5] forward more rapidly,” Hammond said.

Larry O’Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET Watch column for SD Times, demurred, stating in an e-mail: “Canvas APIs define a resolution-dependent bitmap area. While somewhat of a half-step in HTML 5 (in that they are limited to 2D), it seems to me that this is an area where greater integration with text-markup is probably called for.”

Microsoft’s Wilson noted that development of the P2P framework would likely advance at a slower pace that it could due to technical considerations, adding that working with the Canvas APIs would require specialized experts.

The work on the next-generation Web protocol is ambitious indeed. New attribute and element tags will embed audio and video content, and will simplify indexing by search engines, rendering on small-screen devices and using voice readers for the visually impaired. Some deprecated elements—center, front and strike—were dropped in favor of CSS, because it provides the same functionality.

HTML 5 has additional APIs for audio, graphics and video, and interactive document editing.

In an attempt at flexibility, HTML 5 can be written using either an HTML or XML syntax, and the specification has precise rules for handling and recovering from syntax errors. HTML 4 browsers can ignore HTML 5 constructs, and existing HTML content remains usable.

Hammond questioned why browser vendors should wait for full compliance before they allow people to take advantage of HTML 5’s features. Web browsers including Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Opera 9.5 and Safari 3.1 have already begun to implement aspects of its language elements and offline storage capability.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) spokesperson Michael Smith acknowledged that HTML’s new functionality makes the specification large, and that a general agreement among most working group members exists that some parts of it would be better off as sub-specifications.

However, he cautioned that it was not a simple task to define the core set of APIs that should be together, and what should be separated out; delegating that decision could lead to those essential APIs getting out of sync with HTML.

Smith pointed to the Document Object Model (DOM), which was a separate specification prior to its implementation in HTML 5, both as an example of that desynchronization and as a specification that is useful outside of HTML.

Although not an exact parallel, since HTML DOM came after HTML 4 and was naturally out of sync with it, it’s still a lesson to learn from, he said. “That was not the best way to maintain it. There needs to be more integration between the APIs and markup language specification than we’ve had in the past,” he said.

“The reason we maintain [the APIs] as part of the HTML 5 specification now is that we have a very active editor [Google’s Ian Hickson] who has demonstrated through merit that he is capable of maintaining those parts within the same spec,” Smith explained.

So for now, nothing changes as far as the W3C is concerned. Smith noted that while modularization of specification is a good idea in principle, the consortium needs a commitment from one or more member organizations to take over a part of the specification. “We don’t have that; nobody has stepped up,” he said.

When asked for a commitment, Microsoft’s Wilson said that the company was willing to step up, but observed that the task of an editorship is a tough job.


Related Search Term(s): HTML 5, Microsoft


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