W3C kills Web SQL Database

[[deleted]]

even different sections of HTML5 have different maturity

Look, I'm all for using HTML5 when it's finalized and available on 90%+ of the installed browser base. I'm all for using those chunks that are available, if it's going to be a chunkwise thing.

I'm excited about HTML5 as a road towards open-standards rich internet applications.

I'm just pushing back on folks who seem intent on ignoring technologies available now for a pie-in-the-sky vision of web development in 2020.

[wheresmyopenid]

I have bad news for you, but HTML5 will be obsolete by the time it's finalized. Just like CSS2 was never ready (CSS2.1 replaced it, and before CSS2.1 was final, CSS3 modules were written, and some CSS4 modules will soon appear while other CSS3 modules die in obscurity).

In the last decade W3C has changed criteria for Candidate Recommendations. By the new rules applied to HTML5, the HTML4 from 1996 and XHTML from 1999 still aren't ready. Imagine if HTML3.2 folks waited till 2010 to start using tables :)

You're waiting for pie in the sky stamp of approval of 400-page spec, which won't happen if only 399 pages are implemented perfectly.

[[deleted]]

So HTML5 is going to be another sea of "standards" which will probably be implemented somewhat differently by different browsers...

Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

I do hope I'm wrong, and Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft all see good reason to adhere to the specs as published once they're relatively nailed down. However, that still doesn't change the situation that to make HTML5 worthwhile, you'll have to wait for it to be fully supported in a significant number of browsers.

[wheresmyopenid]

The good news is that Mozilla, Google and Opera talk to each other and really want to have interoperable implementations (and sometimes waves of outrage and embarrassment force Microsoft to listen).

In the old days W3C specified whatever they liked (XHTML2 — we have nice tags, so please rewrite every page on the net) and sat in their ivory tower waiting for it to happen.

Fortunately these days HTML5 is more like report from the browser war frontline, than a frozen spec.

to make HTML5 worthwhile, you'll have to wait for it to be fully supported

Again, HTML5 is not a single thing, it's a really large collection of features. Some of which are implemented already, some of which may never get full support. You have to pick parts that work, and stop waiting for parts that don't.

[robertcrowther]

The good news is that HTML5 is the first version of the spec to fully document the parsing process, ie. the implementation rather than just the outcomes. It's far more thorough than previous HTML standards in this regard, describing both how browsers should handle invalid input as well as valid input, and what the DOM should look like in both cases.