‘We don’t have HTML anymore’

Shelley Powers, commenting on the state of the HTML5 draft specification, argues persuasively for blunt force editing:

In fact, HTML Working Group is a bit of a misnomer. We don’t have HTML anymore, we have a Web OS.

We don’t have a simple HTML document, we have a document that contains the DOM, garbage collection, the Canvas object and a 2D API, a definition for web browser objects, interactive elements, drag and drop, cross document communication, channel messaging, Microdata, several pre-defined vocabularies, probably more JavaScript than the ECMAScript standard, and before they were split off, client-side SQL, web worker threads, and storage. I’m sure there’s a partridge in a pair tree somewhere in there, but I still haven’t made it completely through all of it. It’s probably in Section 10. I know there’s talk of extending to the document to include a 3D API, and who knows what else.

It’s a good post. If you’re interested in the more analytical side of this unfolding drama, this is a good summary article that focuses on the struggle over RDFa.

(Brief aside, I learned HTML and CSS by reading the W3C specs, amongst other things. I hope the end result for HTML5 is a document that you can actually read. WCAG 2.0 was brought back from the brink at the eleventh hour. HTML5 could use the same treatment.)