I buy cheap web design books off Amazon, not realising that they’re 5 years old until I open them. This would put me off but the majority of the time the information inside applies today as much as it did years ago. Why buy a book on web standards that came out 3 months ago when it will cover the exact same principles from 3 years ago!

On the other side - FF3 has been unleashed and supposedly carries full CSS3 support. Whether IE8 will or not remains to be seen… you can never really trust Microsoft’s word.

Its one to say we’ll see what happens.

Look at the downfalls of Flash:
• Massive loading times for simple documents
• Searchability is extremely low to none on most search engines. This process isn’t going to speed anymore then HTML5 support is. Not only that, CSS3 is already being widely supported by Opera, Firefox, and Safari. With IE8 coming out I think this will help even more.
• Have to use Flash to even make it. Notepad and TextEdit is free and preinstalled on Mac and Windows. Why pay hundreds to thousands to be able to create websites?!

IE8 is coming out soon and I can’t wait. I never use IE6 or 7, but IE8 will be amazing for me as a Web Developer. HTML5 will be supported and CSS3 is already almost completely supported by IE8. It’s not a loss at all.

MCory, blink tag was an Easter egg in the Netscape browser lol. You can still use it in CSS with text-decoration:blink; lol.

It’s not that I have any problem with CSS and making X/HTML more semantic. It is the approach we should be taking and CSS does give more flexibility. But for the powers-that-be to force everyone down the more involved route and completely miss as simple a solution as a couple of additional attributes was just barking.

I say this because the web is/was primarily about making information freely accessible. Complicating the underlying markup and creating a new complimentary styling language only pushed it closer to the professional developer and further from the well meaning amateur. Which is not my idea of empowering anyone.

Thank God sites like MySpace have come to the amateurs rescue to churn out badly malformed markup for them instead of forcing these users to half-learn how to produce half-assed code themselves.

What I find particularly ironic with HTML 5 is the re-introduction of the menu container and tweaking in meaning of other once deprecated elements.

Utterly nuts!

Anyway, this might be considered a rant. Probably because it is. But hopefully it raises a point even if it’s not been ranted about particularly well.

I agree we should be moving forward. New CSS. New HTML (or preferably XHTML). Being more semantic. But alienating amateurs in the process shouldn’t have been and should never be an option.

I’ll think straight tomorrow ;-)

In one point I agree with you - it will take a long time until HTML5 is widely supported, but once done it will be used on many pages. There are a lot elements really important for the new wave of web development with blogs / boards and wikis. I can imagine that also search engines will make use of the new elements to determine what a page is about..
Maybe I will publish an own article on my website in a few days.. Hope you take a look.

Personally, I think Microsoft should push browser updates to everyone — regardless of the legal status of their copy of Windows.

I run a larger danish retail website an by looking at the statistics of the site i can se that meany still use IE6 but most visitors use flash 9 and the rest flash 7. All versions under flash 7 only represent less than 2%.

So it’s safe to say that all IE6 users on the site uses flash 7 or 9. IE6 were released in 2001 and Flash 7 in 2004 so most IE users have updated ther flash versions but not there browsers.

I think there are 2 reasons for that:
1. Updating a browser is a greater task to the inexperienced computer user.
2. Microsoft arent as good at dristibuting updates as adobe and they are not as pushy to get pepole to update ther computers.

But over the last year i can se that MEANY of the IE6 users have updated to IE7 so i only expect a full update to take 2 more years (witch is only about 3 microsoft weeks). So before 2015 all IE versions vill be IE8 at least and perhaps a great deal will be IE9 or IE10 with hopefully will support HTML5 and CSS3.

This period can be reduced allot if microsoft gets as good at upgreating as adobe or even mozill is.

• but it’s only my guess…

As for Flash, I personally don’t agree that it’s a better alternative. It’s bulky (which is less important these days, since a developer can almost depend on broadband) and, frankly, I’m too cheap to go and shell out that much money. While you can create some impressive effects with it, it isn’t necessarily relevant for a lot of sites — if, as a client, I want a web site that’s quite simple and mostly informative, your Flash site is going to be overkill and is going to cost me a lot more than what I’m willing to spend. When I’m surfing the web, I want to get to the information quick and painlessly, and I don’t really care a whole lot about having animated menus and a soundtrack. Most of the time, when I come to a Flash website, I just turn and run. (I know I’m probably in the minority on that, but…)

What I find amusing is the concept of a “standard” that’s hardly standard. I don’t mean proprietary additions (such as IE’s annoying “blink” tag), but the fact that each browser has their own subset of features that they support. It defeats the purpose; it should be called the “W3C Suggestion”. Think about it in other realms of development — what would be the uproar if the next version of Visual C++ decided they weren’t going to support “for” loops?