HTML5 is a mess.

That was a phrase in my Refresh presentation in December, when I was speaking of the dueling organizations jockeying for control of the spec.

At the time of my writing, I did not know how clean it was by comparison to its status today.

Today’s comic features Hixie the Leviathan interrupting a Muppet-show like meeting of the W3C HTML5 group. Blame the parody of Henson’s creations on the commentary of one Mr. Jeremy Keith. Tweets like this are candy for people like me. The comic also features Sam Ruby, John Foliot, Manu Sporny, Jeremy Keith and Bruce Lawson as Muppet parodies.

The fact is that it seems that Ian “Hixie” Hickson, the HTML5 editor, has taken his ball and gone home. He’s started splitting out the HTML5 spec on the W3C side of things into a shredded mess, by his own words with the hope that if the W3C spec becomes a giant mess, people will drift to the WHATWG spec by default. He’s petulantly insisted that microdata (his own creation) is part of HTML despite the recent W3C work that resulted in it being moved out of the spec. He states that the WHATWG spec trumps the W3C spec, so the latter organization has to get over itself and get back with the program. He’s implied that he’d prefer authors (that’s web designers/developers) stop using HTML5 features as much as they have because it’s causing problems. (This further reinforces my belief that Hixie is following an Implementer > Author > User mentality instead of the User > Author > Implementer mentality that HTML was built upon.) He’s made HTML versionless, insisting that HTML5 is a snapshot that he’s already gone past, and is sitting as monarch for life on the continuing evolution of the spec.

All this from a guy who’s catch phrase seems to be “I don’t understand.” Which is, to me, a dangerous trait in a person empowered with absolute rule over the spec.

In short, like Jeremy, I’m frustrated with a lot of the recent HTML-related issues from the front of advocacy. I’ve tried to sell HTML5 (and it’s grab-bag of toys) to co-workers, peers in web design, total strangers, and friends who didn’t escape a conversation early enough. I want to see it used more, so the browsers speed up implementation of juicy features, so I can use it even more excessively, and so on.

But if people don’t even know if HTML5 exists anymore, or the status of the organizations working on it seem to be out of whack, why would they bother using the <video> tag or exploring <canvas>? We need to give people something to work with. Which means we need to not have insane grandstanding by a single individual.

But hey, this is just one squirrel’s view: HTML5 is a mess.

Today’s comic features a rather large cast of web designers (Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, Elliot Jay Stocks and Jeremy Keith) doing nothing involving the web. Rather, each of them has traveled to the Pilcrow Public House for a tall drink and a leisurely respite.

Although I’m deeply in love with the Internet and its delicious offerings, I find that the 21st century is running at a pace that is accelerating and doesn’t allow for much leisure, even during your leisure time. My own plate is rather full, even outside my work hours, with various online and offline activities that result in my bitter laughter when someone asks what I’m doing with my spare time this week.

If, as a web developer, I were to fashion a pub, I’d probably call it the Pilcrow. I’m blaming all the typography nuts that are in my feed reader. Hence it plays stage for a look at what I imagine leisure would be like in the middle of nowhere, preferably without any wifi or 3G signals, leaving you with no choice but to put down the phone and look at who’s next to you.

True to the premise of slowing down, this comic was inspired by some older posts on the blogs of the notables above. When Dan Cederholm updated the design of SimpleBits, he spoke briefly in his post Woodpress about his desire to start writing posts more often, and not for search engines or tutorials, but for conversation.

Ethan Marcotte picked up the thread in an entry by the same name, complimenting Dan’s redesign and realizing that his “quasi-tumblog” wasn’t entirely cracked up as he wanted it to be.  He then quoted a sentence from this post by Merlin Mann that really hit me where it counts: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

Amen to that. I love Twitter. It’s a great way to get an idea out quickly, to share links and views among peers when time is short or when dealing with a keyboard the size of my thumb. But sometimes I feel like I’ve lost the ability to take my time and write at length because of that need to get the ideas out quickly.

The clincher for me was Elliot Jay Stocks’ contribution to 24ways.org (the web designer’s advent calender) entitled A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just For Christmas. It’s a great read, discussing the need for our own pet projects as a form of relieving work pressure, collaborating with friends, and improving our quality of life. I couldn’t agree more. CSSquirrel is in essence a pet project, but lacks that collaborative nature that can be so addicting. I need to find some quality geeks and a wacky idea and get rolling. To me, these sort of projects are an equivalent the fixer-uppers in the garages of our fathers. They’re there for some peace and the opportunity to play with your toolset.

So I don’t know about you, but one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to find a way to slow down where it counts, and tinker more where it doesn’t. Or the reverse of that. I’m not sure which.

(Regarding Meyer and Keith’s presence in the comic: Eric Meyer wrote on Twitter about applying to truck-driver’s school on a day off. Fictitious or real, I found it hilarious. I also recently re-discovered the Salter Cane website, featuring a band including one Jeremy Keith on bouzouki. I’ve found the music rather enjoyable, and may have to purchase one of their albums.)

Today, Geocities dies a quiet whimpering death after fifteen years in operation. Along with millions of really bad web pages (such as ones I once made just after high-school involving neon colors and table-based ‘designs’), it dragged screaming into the void no doubt thousands of good web pages. Now, millions of links on the Internet point to nothing, to a void from which nothing returns. It’s not the link rot apocalypse, but it’s a small glimpse into what it could look like.

Jeremy Keith has made it very clear he’s mad about this, much more so than I could ever care to muster. I’m personally glad some of my past embarrassments are now quietly euthanized, but he likes to look at the long picture. This is a picture I can’t really bring into focus myself, but today’s comic (starring Jeremy) posits a future where, tragically, Geocities held a key we needed to save humanity.

When I look at this objectively (rather then in embarrassment at my own past efforts at web “design”) I’d have to say that the tragedy here is the loss of a large chunk of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century information about our society and culture. The Internet is notable for both its size and general lack of backups. The more of it we lose, the less our great-grandchildren will know about who we were. I don’t currently have children, but if I ever did, I’d like my descendants to know I spent a great deal of time obsessing over squirrels.

It’d be more than I know about my own ancestors.

Today’s comic features Jeremy Keith, HTML5 “Doctor” Mike Robinson and the squirrel having an innocent conversation about Thai food and emails going where they don’t belong, while the poor Google-bot attempts to understand who is speaking without semantic guidance. I should warn you, a specific body part’s medical term is used a few times. All in good taste, mind you.

The reason that these two fine England-dwelling individuals join the squirrel in the strip is that each of them also had a slight issue with something that I found distasteful over the week: HTML5 documentation giving guidance for using non-semantic markup as a solution for marking conversations in HTML. The markup in question for a short time suggested using the b tag to note a speaker, with the text of the speech being in p tags. A short bit of criticism later and that was dropped, but as you can see here, there’s no replacement suggestions yet for any semantic solution.

Look. It’s 2009. We’re working on HTML5. We know that semantic-free markup (or semantically-confused markup) is something best avoided when possible. A conversation is one of the basic methods of human communication. I’m going to guess 99.999% of all people have at least one conversation daily. At least a portion of these end up on the web. Is there any reason to assume that we wouldn’t want to make this data more accessible for machines and screen-readers to understand?

The proposed dialog element has apparently gone the way of the dodo. I don’t know if this is good or bad. But I’d like some sort of method to markup conversation that isn’t arbitrary and devoid of meaning. And, contrary to the opinion put forth in this W3C mailing list email, I’m going to believe that my opinion on this matter is valid despite my tendency to draw squirrels. Ever since making the commitment to providing transcripts of the comics I create, I’m invested in having some method to mark up conversation. I’m also in the camp that prefers that markup to make sense.

I don’t know all the pros and cons, but I like the proposal put forth by the HTML5 Super Friends in their list of concerns: let’s use cite and q, or at the very least do some research to see how well that one works out. It makes sense, it’s simple, and we don’t have to invent new elements. I for one am going to start using them going forward until something that makes more sense comes along.

But enough with suggesting semantic-free elements for markup. We’ve already got div and span, I don’t really see the need for b and i to keep rearing their ugly heads.

Today’s comic, which features a massive ensemble cast of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Tantek Çelik, Nicole Sullivan and Wendy Chisholm (guest starring Chris Wilson astride a unicorn), is something like gloss and candy. It’s not tackling a serious issue. Rather, it’s tackling a humorous name created by a group of great people who are themselves tackling a serious issue.

As this photo conclusively proves, the people above (minus Chris Wilson and the unicorn) gathered in the recent past to discuss something very vital. Contrary to popular rumor, it was not the secret location of the Holy Grail or harnessing the power of cold fusion. Nay, they were instead talking about HTML5. More importantly, they were talking about HTML5 as “authors”. For pretty much anyone who reads this blog and doesn’t work for a browser manufacturer, that means you, or your son (if your my parents. Hi mom! Hi dad!)

Like the Hardy Boys, these people were industriously searching for clues, especially clues along the line of “what the hell is HTML5 anyway, and how does it apply to a web designer?” After spelunking the depths of the spec, they surfaced with two things: Firstly, they declared that it was good. Secondly, (and for my purposes, more importantly) they chose  an identity to bind them: The HTML5  Super Friends.

Today’s comic is comedic salute to their bravery and choice of identity. They’ve already done us a great deal of good by recommending alterations to the footer element (which was already a source of annoyance to yours truly) which has now come to pass.

Keep up the noble work, dear heroes.

(And in case you wanted to know, Chris Wilson’s appearance was due to his tweet here regarding the presence of the unicorn on the HTML5 Super Friends page.)