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January 22, 2008
Specs vs capabilities
Specs vs capabilities: HTML was a good idea: an easy-to-learn markup language for hypertext documents. As it became popular people wanted to turn it into other things... layout was an early goal, and people used TABLE tags for positioning, then later moved into styling for layout (the logic of which I never quite understood). Once text-retrieval was available in the socially-acceptable Firefox browser, we saw Ajax. Anyway, even though HTML has become more complex as it has attempted to please more constituencies, the basic promise was of an easy markup language, which any client could render identically to others. Now there's a proposal to put a runtime identifier in HTML documents. Instead of trying to render the specifications (at which no browser fully succeeds), they'll try to render previous runtimes... here, Eric Meyer says: "The idea is that when IE10 loads up my IE7 page, it rewinds itself to act like IE7 did, all those years ago -- no matter what changed in the meantime." What was once a neutral document format now becomes, essentially, a set of runtime-specific rendering instructions. That seems a significant change in philosophy. Color me skeptical -- I think hypertext markup serves best as a neutral document format, accessible to the average person with only a moderate amount of study. If implementations end up differing so significantly in capabilities, then that shows that the original shared specification was flawed, or overambitious, or both. But maybe that's just me. More from Jeffrey Zeldman and Aaron Gustafson.
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 22, 2008 8:19 AM