Know a few facts
A few years back, HTML used to be the language of the webmasters for creating websites with ease. It was a simple language and everyone could use it. School students even created their own web pages using HTML. But it was seen that most pages didn’t adapt to the simple laws of the language as their webmasters were more concerned with the message. Most of the browsers had bad code and just displayed the things that their webmasters desired to display.
In the year 1999, the W3C ultimately decided to discard HTML and start using XHTML. Everything was going fine until some people realized that upgrading the language from XHTML to XHTML2 had almost nothing to do with the web. As it was XML, the spec needed a browser to stop providing if it found an error. W3C was working on a new language to upgrade the old HTML, it vilipended certain elements like <img> and <a>.
But what happened is that in the year 2004, experts from Mozilla and Opera questioned this approach and presented a paper strongly saying that:
“We consider Web Applications to be an important area that has not been adequately served by existing technologies… There is a rising threat of single-vendor solutions addressing this problem before jointly-developed specifications.”
The paper presented 7 point on design:
1. A clear migration path should be included and there should also be provision for backwards compatibility.
2. It should have a precise and well defined error handling system like that of CSS. It will ignore the unknown stuff and move on. It shouldn’t have XML’s “draconian: error handling process”.
3. Scripting should be avoided as much possible and declarative mark up may be used.
4. Authoring errors should not be exposed before the users.
5. Device specific profiling should always be avoided.
6. While in the practical use, each feature that is included in the Web application should be justified by practicality. It should be remembered that every use case may not endorse anew feature.
7. Keep the process open and let the archives, draft specifications and mailing lists visible to the public.
As W3C rejected the proposals, Mozilla and Opera and at a later stage Apple started a mailing list known as WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) based on their proof-of-concept. The spec upgraded the HTML4 forms and developed it as Web Applications 1.0. Ian Hickson remained the editor until he left Opera to join Google.
Read more: Design modo
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