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Thursday, July 08, 2004

Safari is polluting HTML

Dave Hyatt has just made a post explaining why they are "extending" HTML.

In short (and with my own words): "Yes. We are introducing new tags and attributes. Yes. We know this is not right. But we need this feature and we need this right now! You guys (web browser vendors) should follow us so that it becomes a standard." Please forgive me if you feel uneasy, but this is the truth.

Isn't that just like the evil M$ (and the old Netscape)? e.g. <iframe> invented by IE is now included in HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional (but not included in XHTML 1.0 Strict or above, thanks god!).

Edited: Uh oh! My CSS doesn't work well with the quote tag (<q>). They are now replaced with a pair of double quotes...

posted by minghong @ 7/08/2004 10:29:00 am  

7 Comments:

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  • At 7/08/2004 10:50:00 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I came to the same conclusion as you.

    Robb Beal

     

  • At 7/09/2004 01:57:00 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    The difference is that Apple are being open, working with others (Opera and Mozilla teams) to implement the same cross-browser, submitting to standards working groups and basically innovating HTML in an obvious way. I mean - a slider, a better search box... I think that is highly useful, clear, and marginalises no one (perhaps with the sole exception of MS).

    In addition, contenteditable, for example, is a de facto standard. Don't shoot Apple down for implementing something IE has had for years.

    At the end of the day Apple's Safari has had a great effect on the browser space. Let's face it, the rejection of Mozilla has now led to a renewed push for Firefox (and Thunderbird) (with also involves Dave Hyatt) and massive improvements there. Their integration with RSS will push that too into main stream apps like Firefox.

    It's innovation, not lockin/out!

     

  • At 7/09/2004 02:32:00 am, Blogger minghong said…

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

     

  • At 7/09/2004 02:44:00 am, Blogger minghong said…

    I don't know how to say this in English, but in Chinese, Safari sounds a lot like "先砍後奏". Maybe someone can help me translate it into English... :-P

    Let me give you an example to illustrate this: say there is a forbidden and irreversible thing that shouldn't be done (breaking the standard). The parents (standard bodies) don't want any of their children (vendors) to do that. But one of the children (Safari) did that finally. Since the parents love their children so much, they forgive him/her (accepting Safari's extension).

    Maybe this example is not so good...

     

  • At 7/09/2004 03:05:00 am, Blogger minghong said…

    As a sidenote, IE has 2 ways to make HTML editable: contenteditable (for part of a HTML document) and designmode (for the whole HTML document). Mozilla currently supports only designmode, while Safari supports (only?) contenteditable. It would be nice if they complete the their remaining halve...

    Anyway, the editing API is still designed for HTML, not XHTML. I know XHTML is a bit more complicated. But if we leave out the namespace part, it is more or less like HTML (in my own words, "HTML with stricter rules and more semantics"), right?

     

  • At 7/09/2004 04:41:00 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    "Let me give you an example to illustrate this: say there is a forbidden and irreversible thing that shouldn't be done (breaking the standard). The parents (standard bodies) don't want any of their children (vendors) to do that. But one of the children (Safari) did that finally. Since the parents love their children so much, they forgive him/her (accepting Safari's extension)."

    The fact is that Safari is not "breaking" the standards, but rather "extending" and in fact even improving it. As they are working with standards groups and other browser maker to make sure that their extension:

    - Will not break the existing standards
    - Will be part of next versions of the standards (Yes a standard evolve, hopefully!!!)

    It's then obvious that Safari will not break the standards this way. So your example is then wrong as you're talking about breaking the standards which is not what Safari guys are doing (quite the opposite in fact).

     

  • At 1/15/2005 10:40:00 pm, Blogger andy said…

    Nope. They would be polluting HTML if they were trying to avoid using the existing syntax used by IE. As it is they are getting on bard with an incredibly useful feature.

    Standards are good whether official or de-facto. When offical standards don't move quickly enough, people will create their own. Even without the W3C rubber stamp there will eventually be editing facilities that are common across most major browsers.

    If the w3c come up with their own syntax in due time and it doesn't match any existing implementations hopefully everyone will ignore it.

     

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