Simon Willison's Weblog: ian-hickson

Quoting Ian Hickson

2010-02-15T19:38:29+00:00

At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they're won't publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can't even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: ian-hickson, adobe, hixie, html5, w3c, canvas, process

Codecs for

2009-07-02T10:16:58+00:00

Codecs for <audio> and <video>

HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses.

Tags: audio, chromium, codecs, google, h264, html5, ian-hickson, mozilla, ogg, patents, theora, video

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification

2009-05-14T16:07:46+00:00

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification

By Bruce Lawson of the Web Standards Project. Worth reading.

Tags: bruce-lawson, html5, ian-hickson, interview, web-standards-project

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

2009-05-11T14:41:17+00:00

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read.

Tags: html5, ian-hickson, markup, microdata, microformats, rdf, rdfa, semantics, whatwg

Quoting Ian Hickson

2009-04-14T16:34:42+00:00

We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".

— Ian Hickson

Tags: ian-hickson, hixie, revcanonical, rev, html5, markup

Quoting Benjamin Smedberg

2009-01-15T22:19:08+00:00

The HTML5 parsing specification contains rules to transform any possible sequence of characters or bytes into a standard document object model. From conversations with Ian, I believe this was one of his primary goals for the initial HTML5 specification.

— Benjamin Smedberg

Tags: benjamin-smedberg, html5, ian-hickson

Quoting Ian Hickson

2008-12-19T13:58:00+00:00

Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: ian-hickson, onbeforeunload, standards, whatwg, html5, javascript

The alt="" attribute from Ian Hickson

2008-09-11T17:45:03+00:00

The alt="" attribute from Ian Hickson

In case you were wondering how it all ended, Hixie has a mammoth summary post explaining the facts and the potential alternatives.

Tags: accessibility, alt-text, html5, ian-hickson

Interview with Ian Hickson about HTML5

2008-09-11T17:29:46+00:00

Interview with Ian Hickson about HTML5

Good questions, interesting answers, including an explanation and breakdown of the planned 2022 date for the final recommendation.

Tags: html5, ian-hickson

James Bennett: Why HTML

2008-06-18T12:27:09+00:00

James Bennett: Why HTML

Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.

Tags: hixie, html, ian-hickson, james-bennett, web-standards, xhtml

Quoting Ian Hickson

2008-04-07T07:24:00+00:00

Ignoring reality in favour of what we would like to be true doesn't actually work. This simple axiom probably underlies almost everything the WHATWG has done so far, and it has so far served us well.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: anne-van-kesteren, whatwg, ian-hickson

Quoting Mike Shaver

2008-03-27T13:35:53+00:00

Ian's Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It's quite explicitly about making browser developers jump - Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn't be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

— Mike Shaver

Tags: mike-shaver, acid3, ian-hickson, webkit, opera, gecko, browsers, web-standards

Acid3 is out

2008-03-05T00:34:20+00:00

Acid3 is out

The third Acid test, again compiled by Ian Hickson. This one viciously tests DOM Scripting standards compliance and currently exposes flaws in every browser.

Tags: acid3, ian-hickson, javascript, standards, web-standards-project

Quoting Ian Hickson

2008-01-23T10:07:40+00:00

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: ian-hickson, hixie, internet-explorer, ie8, xuacompatible, web-standards, browsers

The future of web standards

2007-12-17T13:16:43+00:00

The future of web standards

Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG.

Tags: bdfl, ian-hickson, james-bennett, linux, open-source, perl, python, standards, w3c, web-standards, whatwg

Quoting Ian Hickson

2007-12-06T15:43:17+00:00

The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: microsoft, open-source, apple, google, ian-hickson, competition

Quoting Ian Hickson

2007-09-04T12:27:33+00:00

I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.

— Ian Hickson

Tags: accessibility, usability, jaws, screen-readers, hixie, ian-hickson

The CSS working group is irrelevant

2007-06-06T10:10:13+00:00

The CSS working group is irrelevant

“Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML”.

Tags: css, hixie, ian-hickson, stardands, w3c, whatwg

Two visions

2007-03-20T08:32:03+00:00

Two visions

It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.

Tags: google, ian-hickson, mark-pilgrim

Live DOM Viewer

2007-02-06T01:12:24+00:00

Live DOM Viewer

Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.

Via Anne van Kesteren

Tags: browsers, dom, ian-hickson, javascript

Hixie on XHTML

2002-09-10T14:30:25+00:00

Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here's the killer point (at least for me):

Document sent as text/html are handled as tag soup [1] by most UAs. This means that authors are not checking for validity, and thus most XHTML documents on the web now are invalid. Therefore the main advantage of using XHTML, that it has to be valid, is lost of the document is then sent as text/html.

XHTML documents that are not well-formed XML are useless, and since browsers still display them the web is potentially being polluted with invalid (and useless) XHTML documents. Ian also makes the point that, while the greatest benefit of XHTML is that it can be processed by XML parsers, the only people likely to take advantage of this ability are the content authors themselves who will most likely be using configurable tools to produce the content anyway.

So why haven't I switched this blog back to HTML 4.01 yet? It's a good question, and one which I will attempt to answer in the not too distant future.

Tags: html, ian-hickson, web-standards, xhtml

Hixie on WaSP

2002-06-13T15:36:22+00:00

Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as "text/html" rather than the more correct "text/xml" required for XHTML documents.

Some of his points seem overly picky, in particular the content-type issue. I checked a site Hixie mentions as sending the correct text/xml content-type header in NS4 and, as I suspected, NS4 popped up a "download" box and failed to render the page. I also checked out the W3's XHTML home page - XHTML1.0 strict and a content-type header of text/html. His other points seem worth thinking about, but I would not consider any of them to significantly dilute WaSP's message.

So respect to Hixie for taking on the mantle of the ultimate standards advocate, but you can take a good thing too far.

Tags: ian-hickson, web-standards-project

Simon Willison's Weblog: ian-hickson

Quoting Ian Hickson

Codecs for and

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for

Quoting Ian Hickson

Quoting Benjamin Smedberg

Quoting Ian Hickson

The alt="" attribute from Ian Hickson

Interview with Ian Hickson about HTML5

James Bennett: Why HTML

Quoting Ian Hickson

Quoting Mike Shaver

Acid3 is out

Quoting Ian Hickson

The future of web standards

Quoting Ian Hickson

Quoting Ian Hickson

The CSS working group is irrelevant

Two visions

Live DOM Viewer

Hixie on XHTML

Hixie on WaSP

Codecs for