HTML5 watch

Keeping up with HTML5 can seem like a full-time job if you’re subscribed to both the W3C public-html list and the WHATWG mailing list.

If you have to choose just one, the WHATWG list is definitely the red pill. The W3C list has a very high volume of traffic, mostly about politics and procedure. Sam Ruby deserves a medal for keeping the whole thing on an even keel.

The WHATWG list, on the other hand, can get pretty nitty-gritty in its discussions of Web Workers, Offline Storage and other technologies that are completely over my head.

The specification itself is shaping up nicely. My list of bugbears is getting shorter and shorter:

1. I’m still not convinced that the article element is necessary, given that it is almost indistinguishable from section. Having two very similar elements is potentially very confusing for authors. It’s hard enough deciding the difference between a section and a div.
2. The time element is still unnecessarily restrictive. I don’t just mean that it’s restrictive in the sense that you can’t mark up a month, the very definition is too narrow. I hoisted the HTML5 spec by its own petard recently, pointing out that a different portion of the spec violates the definition of time.
3. The cite element is also too restrictively defined, and in a backwards-incompatible way to boot. I’ve written more about that over on 24 Ways.

There are much bigger issues than these still outstanding—mostly related to the accessibility of audio, video and canvas—but I’ll leave it to smarter people than me to tackle those. My issues all revolve around semantics and, let’s face it, they’re kind of piddling little problems in the grand scheme of things.

On the whole, I’d say the spec is looking mighty fine. Most of it is ready for use today.

I think the next big challenge for HTML5 lies with the tools. It’s great that we’ve got a validator but what we really need is a lint tool—something like JSlint but for checking markup writing style: case sensitivity of tags, quotes around attributes, that kind of thing. Robert Nyman concurs.

Let be clear: I’m not talking about a validator that checks for polyglot documents i.e. HTML that can also be parsed as XML. I’m talking purely about writing style and personal preference; a tool that will help enforce an in-house style guide of arbitrary “best” practices.

I’ve impressed this upon Henri in IRC on a few occasions. He has explained to me that it’s not so easy to build a true syntax checker …and no, you can’t just use regular expressions.

Still, I think that there would be enormous value in having even an imperfect tool to help authors who want to write HTML5 right now but also want to enforce a strict syntax on themselves. A working rough’n’ready lint tool that catches 80% of the most common gotchas is better than a theoretical perfect tool that will work 100% of the time but that currently works 0% of the time because it doesn’t exist yet.

Anybody want to step up to challenge?