Jeffrey Zeldman: "HTML 5 is a mess. Now what?" →
Less an opinion than a summary of the discussion that’s flared up since XHTML2 was killed earlier this month.
As this developer sees it, a lot of people seem to have confused a couple of awesome HTML5 features — standards-based video embedding, client-side database support, cool new structural tags like header — for the spec as a whole. The new HTML 5 features are undeniably awesome, and hopefully we won’t have to wait till 2015 to enjoy them. But having to use classes or IDs to denote sidebars or dialogue is hardly the most annoying or problematic thing about HTML, and the idea that if WHATWG disagrees with a change they can just fork the spec is simply insane.
