31–40 of 94 posts
HTML doesn't need to be simplified to reign in the complexity. Rather, it needs to be completed as a hypertext, so that people can build complete software systems using (only or mostly) that language. See the htmx examples page for stuff that should be doable in plain HTML: https://htmx.org/examples/ The fact that only anchor and forms, only clicks and submits, only GET and POST and only full page replacement is avai…
From my perspective, the reason to have a language for static documents is parsability. With HTML5+CSS+JS, there are few organizations at the scale which can sustain making something like a web browser, a general-purpose web crawler, a11y tools, or similar. Could it be a common language? Perhaps. I liked HTML2. I hated basically everything which went into HTML3 and HTML4. HTML5 has made a lot of good progress on roll…
Most of what I do on the web resolves around reading things, not interacting in any meaningful way. Most of the web tries it's best to ruin that experience. Most of what I do online would be better served by gopher. I understand I am a part of a minuscule minority, but that doesn't stop me from whining.
Heck, go back to using WML. It would be interesting to build that browser again, the cards would work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
Plus it did not help that the entire device rebooted on a markup parsing errors and such bugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The projects that SDOs decide to work on are those which people there are willing to spend their time on. An SDO could say "we're doing project X", but if nobody shows up…
Sure, but htmx is small (~1.7K loc[1]), written mostly by one guy part time and, while not perfect, advances HTML significantly as a hypermedia. That something like this hasn't been discussed in a significant, public manner by the w3c in over a decade[2] indicates to me there is either a lack of understanding or of interest in advancing HTML as a hypermedia. I readily admit I may be missing something. [1] - https://g…
1) Changes to HTML can create security issues, especially if it results in a change to the HTML parser. You have to consider that non-browser use cases still need to be able to parse HTML correctly. Since we opted to make HTML versionless with it became harder to do.
2) Big changes are harder to get consensus on. This is one of the reasons why they opt to do smaller, less controversial changes.
3) w3c and whatwg are dominated by large corporations, who hire thousands of engineers to work on their web properties. They are able to overcome the shortcomings of HTML easier than small teams and single-developer websites.
I agree though, this is a major problem. HTML is essentially a dead language, no major changes have been made in almost a decade.
HTML doesn't need to be simplified to reign in the complexity. Rather, it needs to be completed as a hypertext, so that people can build complete software systems using (only or mostly) that language. See the htmx examples page for stuff that should be doable in plain HTML: https://htmx.org/examples/ The fact that only anchor and forms, only clicks and submits, only GET and POST and only full page replacement is avai…
I think this is an interesting and important argument, because I always felt many shortcomings of the modern web were actually caused by browser vendors and their reluctance to improve their platforms and the web. We have so many custom UI Elements, because forms did and still do suck. RSS always had a back seat, because it always was second class in browsers. Semantic web died outside of search engines, because brow…
From my perspective, the reason to have a language for static documents is parsability. With HTML5+CSS+JS, there are few organizations at the scale which can sustain making something like a web browser, a general-purpose web crawler, a11y tools, or similar. Could it be a common language? Perhaps. I liked HTML2. I hated basically everything which went into HTML3 and HTML4. HTML5 has made a lot of good progress on roll…
XHTML2. You just need XML parser for that.