| The goal isn’t perfection (which is after all the enemy of good) Who has this much arrogance? This isn't the 1980s there aren't a few hundred developers playing around on spare university machines here. This spec is one of the most expensive documents in the world. I'd be suprised if tens of billions of dollars hasn't been lost because of just HTML 5 nevermind its predecessors. HTML 5 affects
- the cost of computers: having to buy better ones as it hogs more ram and cpu
- the accessibility of the internet as swathes of poorer users are cut off from websites that don't support their mobile phones or won't load on their internet speeds
- the accesibility of millions more who can't browse on internet enabled devices (internet enabled TVs, unupgradeable phones, etc)
- the accessibility of websites as screenreaders stop working
- the huge cost of development as web developers have to skill-up
- the stresses on developers and businesses who don't want to have to re-develop their work again and again and again and again
- the monopolies that run in the internet as development of alternative browsers for
- the backwards compatibility conundrum: we've nearly got rid of the pervasiveness of of the HTML4 only browsers
- the cost to the environment (this is serious: mobile devices use some pretty horrible rare metals, they use energy and they aren't easy to dispose, so if you have to upgrade it's not good)
- the list goes on ... So the goal should pretty much be perfection, because at the costs involved good simply isn't good enough If that is too much, then modularise the specs, delegate the work into manageable specs and if you've not got a spare billion lying around to develop it, then find it because this spec needs to be awesome. Failing that, since HTML started: the Linux community realised that X11 isn't good enough; Microsoft canned its UI framework (or three of them?), Apple and Google brought in new Mobile UI frameworks and also, J2ME and Symbian largely disappeared: it might be time for us to consider deprecating HTML and finding a more appropriate body capable of creating a better web language. |