Leading www professional Jefferey Zeldman and his renown friends have published a declaration about the HTML5 drafts today:

"We have significant concerns about some aspects of HTML5 specification but we’ll remain optimistic." So, this is what this article is all about, concerns regarding the upcoming mark-up standards...

Despite how much we liked the idea of a renewed standard in world-wide-web’s “core” mark-up language that would cover both today's modern-time necessities and yesterday’s now-obvious flaws and gaps, we couldn't help ourselves getting carried away by a future prospect; especially after what we ha read about the eagerly-awaited HTML5 drafts on W3C official website.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web by creating the first web server (thru a combination of transmission control protocol and domain name ideas), thus, enabled distant computers to share their information as digital documents to be copied. Now, he is building a web for open and linked data that could do for numbers what the web did for words, pictures and video. To do that, there must be people willing to share their data, unlock them, and re-frame their use. Again to do that, we need web designers from all over the globe, who are not disregarding the idea of “semantic web” and following the strict standards along with accessibility guidelines.

What I had on my mind was creating real norms and a code that would be backed by effective means on solid grounds, like allocating international funds and subsidies to be granted for software manufacturers and search engine operators, that are essentially participating and likely to be participating into this and similar World-Wide-Web Consortium projects for the next 10 years. If this is a standard at all, then even in Zanzibar (not only in Dallas or Sacramento) people on mobile access, with or without a complete visual access, should be following it.

I believe, just like the “super friends” have already stated, there are things needed to be reconsidered, revised and re-suggested but no matter how, no matter what disappointments waiting for us, we will always be there or thereabouts to be supporting and “backing” the standards as exemplary citizens and individuals. Remember, when we’re talking about “standards based and fluid web-design” they are counter-offering “professional and rigid web design”; I guess still a vast majority of the web pages today are still design-wise tabled ( or designed table-wise-?), creating a big mass on search engines and at our DSL lines with their whole junk of 90’s techniques and cheap SEO techniques from the hear-say, here in the year 2009.

Concerns of HTML5 at a glance:

HTML 5 is a new and revised version of HTML and XHTML. According to WHATWG, their current HTML 5 draft specification defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML that addresses the needs of new web applications and hopefully solves the issues in previous iterations of HTML

Before getting started to list-down my worries - and in general, “our” worries that are mostly in common, I should point out that there is an ambiguous situation beginning from the name of this standard, whether it should be written separately as in “HTML 5” or it’ll have a typographic characteristics and a brand look as in “HTML5”. Nobody has asked me, but if it happens someday I’ll vote for the latter one in order to honor my stylistic personality.

Also what is concerning among the most is the inflated numbers of “likely-to-be-proposed HTML elements” while some others - including myself, had expectations of finding the things been made smoother and a lot easier this time. For instance, the reduction of “pre-(browser)wars era terms” would be a good start point; effectively identical elements such as “Q and CITE, STRONG and B, OBLIQUE and I, and even CITE again” should have been vanished the next day we woke up, and elements of the group “B, I, U, SMALL, BIG etc.” should have been regarded as display-centric presentational elements and never been associated with the term “standard” any longer.

While we are preserving all the antiques to our most surprises - perhaps in the name of “respecting their popularity”, we are heralded with more and more element names that are perfectly ENGLISH and waiting to be proposed on our wakes: “ARTICLE, SECTION, HEADER, FOOTER, ASIDE” and the list goes on as such. WHATWG folks have already cared for preparing a demo web page for us, which was written in HTML5.

The Argument and Conclusion:

What result can readers derive from this situation? First of all, these are just working drafts of an ongoing project, nobody is trying to develop a big bang theory overnight and the letters (and articles) like this one are counted as a feedback of some value to the work-group members. In this feedback, I have signaled out that we, designers and developers of various quarters, are aware of these works and hopefully contributing to these efforts with our own letters, arguments, and if necessary, with our protest / support banners.

At the time being, I have the silly idea that these working drafts may be based on screen reader software mostly of the past decade, and they might have overly emphasized the backwards-compatibility issues. Hence, I further believe they might have been disregarding obvious performance-leap of today's average platforms, which is likely to be leading to be more and more tolerating forgiving towards all the "out-of-standards" and "out-of-semantics" use of web design elements. These are unfortunately still existing quite common even in today. If the medium was televisions and not internet, a proposal of a new UHF band would render all the existing - outdated receivers "useless" since virtually all the manufacturers and TV stations would be heading that way in advance. No need to mention what a new standard might mean to the world-wide dead-economies (i.e. G3, and now G4 in mobile technology leads booming in the market all of a sudden).

Not sure if "Zeldman and his friends" would bring their "F2F" campaigns into the Times Sq. but I believe whatever the result would be, we will volunteer to help these standards and implementations established in industry by providing with the best we can.

Reference links:

• A thorough list of elements has been made available on line by W3C, HTML 5 – A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. If you’d like to, W3C has also published HTML5 Differences from HTML4.
• Another previously uncovered and highly imported issue, the native RDF support is also going to be proposed and the current draft can be seen at “HTML5 + RDFa – A mechanism for embedding RDF in HTML” as the W3C Editor’s Draft.

best regards;
kunter ilalan, designer & front-end web developer
http://about.me/kunter -- twitter @kunter