Read any web designer’s blog and one thing will become obvious—HTML5+CSS3 is allegedly the best thing to happen to the Internet since Firefox. It seems like their excitement has spilled over to the entire tech community, but does anyone know why they are so excited about the new languages?
The next time a tech tries to evangelize HTML5 at you, here are three tidbits you can throw back at them:
One, your browser doesn’t support it.
Even the newest browsers on the market have limited and spotty support for HTML5 and CSS3. New HTML5 tags like <header> and <footer> need to be styled for backwards compatibility. Developers need to jump through hoops to code CSS3 differently for each browser that supports it (Firefox requires you to prefix new property names with -moz-, for example, while Safari requires you to use -webkit-). In other words, until new web browsers fully support the new languages, and until those browsers become de facto standards (how many people still use IE6?), HTML5+CSS3 is just a hindrance.
Two, you won’t notice a difference, anyway.
Rounded corners are a hallmark of Web 2.0 design, but the biggest reason that web designers seem to care about CSS3 is the new support for rounded corners. While it’s great that designers will eventually (see point one) have an easier way to make boxes with rounded corners, where’s the benefit to the end user? We’ve been seeing rounded corners for years. The same can be said for all new CSS3 features.
Techs are excited about the audio/video capabilities of HTML5, but it doesn’t bring anything to the table that Adobe Flash doesn’t already do, or couldn’t easily do in its next edition. If you don’t have Flash installed, chances are you don’t have an HTML5-capable browser (again, see point one), so where’s the benefit? This one only seems to pay off for mobile web browsing (or other device browsers like the Nintendo Wii), and only when the native browser has full HTML5 support (which none of them currently do!)
Three, despite popular belief, semantic markup doesn’t really help anything.
SEOs speculate that HTML5’s new semantic markup will help search engines decide how much value to give a page’s links. For example, links inside <footer> and <nav> tags can be considered less important, if considered at all. But two important points:
- Search engines already seem to devalue these links. SEOs have noticed that search engines seem to look for the context and positioning of links, specifically paying attention to surrounding text.
- It’s SEOs who are speculating this use of semantic markup. If an SEO is trying to pass juice through a footer link, they simply won’t use the <footer> tag. Problem solved.
If the search engines choose to use semantic markup to their advantage, they will still also use whatever tactics they currently use to determine the relevance of links on your page. HTML5 might help keep honest people honest, but doesn’t deter search spam.
Web developers predict that semantic coding will help them do their jobs easier, and possibly help them collaborate easier; however, until HTML5 support is standard, coding is actually more difficult (see point one). Although HTML5 theoretically makes it easier for a new programmer to pick up where one left off, if the first developer was following conventions, it’s already easy for someone new to pick up the pieces. HTML5+CSS3 also don’t have lower learning curves than their predecessors. In other words, where’s the benefit?
Newbie techs might mistakenly believe that a semantic language would be quicker for a browser to render. In fact, parsing HTML5 is no easier than parsing its predecessor, and rendering CSS3 is, if anything, more difficult because of advanced selectors and additional attributes.
Can you think of a reason I should care right now about HTML5+CSS3? Leave a comment.
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Everyone should be excited about HTML5 and CSS3 right now because of what it enables those excited web designers to do.
Similar to the upgrade Java 5, developers were awash with excitement about the generics system, for loops, autoboxing, typesafe enums, varargs, etc. They weren’t excited for their end users (none of those features are user facing), they were excited for themselves. The features introduced with Java 5 allowed them to write code faster and with less errors. It got some of the annoyances of developing in Java “out of the way” of development.
Similarly, with HTML5 and CSS3, there are a lot of annoyances that are disappearing into language syntax. Developers won’t have to add awkward code to add classes to HTML elements with advanced CSS selectors. The audio and video tags will let them quickly develop working copies of the ideas in their head (for example, see http://www.ressq.com/videoTag/video.htm – Firefox 3.5 only). I don’t want to list every new feature coming out in HTML5, but as a short list of awesome check out (https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Firefox_3.5_for_developers). Each one of those features is something developers had to either use an abstraction layer to get around (drag & drop) or had to spend extra time coding around these limitations.
Enhanced developer productivity, creativity and excitement is something users will certainly see very quickly. Whether it’s directly implemented in HTML5 or back-ported into HTML4 standards, the ideas implemented through this exciting “new shiny toy” period have real value to the end user.
in my opinion, the best thing coming with html5 is web sockets, web apps will be much more different than todays