Deathshadow's Madness

Been a good while since I've posted anything, so here's a little rant.

As time wears on and more people start to embrace HTML5 I'm starting to REALLY sour on it... the biggest reason for this is that in general it seems like HTML5 was hijacked by people who don't know what semantic markup is, missed the entire POINT of separation of presentation from content that CSS made possible, and did the exact OPPOSITE of what is the supposed goal - making web development simpler. I think that's what people miss about 'STRICT' - it's SIMPLER to use because you can cut out all that excess bull... adding more tags and attributes is the OPPOSITE of all the progress we've made in HTML the past decade!

One of the whole reasons MENU and DIR were deprecated was that UL and OL did the same job just as well and it meant less tags for people to learn - So what do they do? They introduce "NAV" and "DIALOG" which appear to be little more than aliases to UL and DL respectively. Or IMG, APPLET and the "browser specific" EMBED were all SUPPOSED to be replaced by OBJECT to make things simpler (the only reason it never caught on was M$ dragging it's heels on implementing it right) - so do we just say "For **** sake make an existing tag ACTUALLY WORK" - hell no, let's introduce a bunch more tags (Video, Audio) and make the browser specific EMBED official...

Then of course you have the HORDE of new attributes. Here we were making strides towards using less attributes when they go and introduce a whole bunch more. Sure some of them (like ping) will be nice to cut back on scripts or unneccessary redirects, but others like extending target (a deprecated in STRICT attribute we ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO USE ANYMORE) to more tags, extending the STYLE tag with 'SCOPED' (when there should be no reason to ever use STYLE as a tag or attribute), or the 'sizes' attribute (when .ico files can hold multiple sizes and color depths!) are seruous Whiskey tango foxtrot territory... and that's before we get into this whole 'prepend the word form before every attribute on a input' nonsense which is the most bizzare thing I've ever seen. (Seriously, why not just call them what they are on form?!?)

As it stands most people writing websites are blissfully unaware of the majority of tags in HTML - Hordes of People using tables still don't know about THEAD, TFOOT, TBODY, TH, CAPTION - nobody bothers using ABBR unless they are a microformats junkie much less ACRONYM, BDO, PARAM, DFN, VAR, KBD... Lands sake most people can't even seem to be bothered to use FIELDSET, LEGEND and LABEL - or even realize that using form elements outside a form is wrong! I'm so sure those new attributes are a great idea with people still using TARGET but cannot even be bothered to learn about MEDIA, LANG or even bothering to put TITLE on the right elements (news flash, IMG ain't it!) much less use OBJECT properly for flash embeds.

Adding more tags and attributes for people NOT to bother learning is SO going to make things better... NOT.

But it goes with what the various browser makers are doing - I actually applaud IE8 for trying to clean up it's CSS2/HTML4 before moving on to CSS3 and HTML5, specifications NOT EVEN OUT OF DRAFT! Were that the folks at Mozilla were so dilligent and instead of having people coding pie-in-the-sky future bullcookies like HTML5 would fix the gaping holes in their HTML4/CSS2 specifications, some of which (like bugzilla 915) are over a DECADE OLD.

In pen and paper gaming circles, there are people often called Munchkins. This is a derogatory term for 'rules lawyers' and technology junkies, who pour through to try and exploit every loophole and must always have the heaviest, most powerful over the top gear, and if the current gear isn't over the top enough - they start making up their own stuff that is so completely overpowering it sucks any fun out of the game for anyone else.

I've got this nasty feeling that Munchkins have hijacked HTML5 to tack on all this extra pointless crap just because they can. They just keep bolting on new stuff nobody should be asking for and there's little reason to be using... and in the process pushing off how far away much of this will be real world deployable a decade or more...

Given that it took over eight years from CSS2 being released from Draft to it being real-world deployable, and that today over a decade after it left draft large sections of HTML4 are still not usable on production websites due to browser support - it's not entirely encouraging for HTML5's future.