Not me. Not really. Right now I’m more bothered about mastering HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1. I went to visit the Future of Web Design conference Website earlier on and was about to register, unfortunately all of the Student Tickets have been taken! =/ Maybe next year. I would have still liked to have gone, but I do have some beef with the schedule.
There’s so much about HTML 5 and CSS 3 right now, not just in conferences like FOWD but also new books are being released on HTML 5 too.
Wait a second now…What have all you professionals been encouranging and making a song and dance about for the past 10 years?..Web Standards…Right? Now correct me if I’m wrong here but when something is a Web Standard it generally means its a standard, you know…Like HTML 4.01 , XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 or ECMAScript-262 5th Edition. They’re Web Standards right?
They haven’t gone out of date. They’re the most recent Web Standards. New Web Standards are being developed - HTML 5 and CSS 3. They aren’t Web Standards yet. And according to the W3C and the WHATWG they aren’t going to be Web Standards for at least a few years, most likely almost a decade until they are fully implemented.
Aren’t we just going back to the bad old days of the Web when using CSS 3 propretiary properties like the one for rounded corners? In the CSS 3 Technical Recommendation, when it is released as a TR - It will specify one property that every Web browser can use, yup? But people are implementing Websites in HTML 5 and CSS 3 and they aren’t even standards yet…Conferences and books on two languages that aren’t specifications yet and could change drastically at any point. Sure, most of these new HTML 5 and CSS 3 based Websites are experimental Websites, that’s fine. I have no beef with that.
I understand the event FOWD is exactly that - The Future of Web Design. But if the HTML 5 and CSS 3 specifications aren’t going to be released for at least another 3 - 4 years (most likely looking at 8 - 10 years) then what is going to be the main talking point / schedule for these sort of events next year and the year after?
I don’t know. It’s a rant I guess. I knew the lineup for the FOWD event last year was awesome and I would have loved to have attended it, but this year not so much. HTML 5 and CSS 3 aren’t relevant to me, and I don’t think they should be relevant to anybody else at the moment, at least not for real Websites. I’m not saying I’m not reading about HTML 5 and CSS 3. I’m reading about them actively, in fact actually the majority of time when I want to read about them I read the current most up to date specification that is published. But the specification is changing every day. We can’t be publishing books on a specification that’s currently being developed as we speak, can we?
Maybe we should concentrate on mastering the current Web Standards that are implemented in Web browsers before we get ahead of ourselves? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick? Someone enlighten me please
Andrew Cooper