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Yap

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An Event Apart News Archive

I'll be delivering half of A Day Apart in Washington DC in September — the HTML5 half. So... there's that.

A Day Apart in Seattle was more like a seminar than a workshop. Rather than being an intimate gathering in a small room, it was more lecture-like in an amphitheatre setting. But that didn’t stop me interacting with the attendees. There were plenty of great questions throughout, and I also had everyone complete an exercise.

I reprised the exercise I gave at dConstruct back in September. It isn’t a test of the audience. Rather, it’s a test of how well the new structural elements in HTML5 are described:

I then asked the attendees to match up the definitions with the element whose name sounded like the best match. To be clear: this wasn’t a test of knowledge. I was testing the spec.

The results from September’s test were quite revealing. There was some confusion between footer and details. Since then, the definitions in the spec have been updated and I’m happy to report that the Seattle audience—a much larger sampling—were almost unanimous in correctly matching element names to their definitions.

With one glaring exception.

The section and article elements were, once again, confused. This happened back in September at dConstruct. It happened again at A Day Apart in Seattle. I didn’t get exact numbers, but from the very web-savvy audience of about two hundred people, I would say there was a 50/50 split in matching up the definitions of section and article. About 50% of the attendees thought that the definition of section applied to article and visa-versa.

Historically, article and section were more distinct. The article element used to have optional cite and pubdate attributes. Now their content models are identical (apart from the fact that the article element can take an optional time element with a pubdate attribute).

The only thing that distinguishes the definition of article from the definition of section is the presence of the phrase self-contained. A section groups together thematically-related content. An article groups together self-contained thematically-related content. That distinction is too fine to warrant a separate element, in my opinion.

The existence of two elements that are practically semantically identical isn’t a harmless addition to HTML5. It’s causing a great deal of confusion. I’ve spoken to authors who incorrectly assumed that articles had to be within sections or that sections could only be within articles. The truth is that you can have sections within articles, articles within sections, sections within sections, articles within articles, or any other combination you can think of.

This isn’t helpful. Authors are confused. Yet, according to the HTML Design Principle of Priority of Constituencies:

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.

I don’t understand why Hixie is still clinging to the addition of the article element when he has repeatedly stated that he wants to keep the number of new elements to a minimum. Here’s the perfect opportunity: merge section and article into one element. Personally, I would keep section, with its more generic-sounding name.

We’ve been here before. The abbr and acronym elements were responsible for years of confusion amongst authors unsure of which one to use. The use-cases and the definitions of both elements were just too similar. That particular problem has been solved in HTML5: the acronym element is now obsolete. The abbr element works well enough for both use cases.

Let’s not repeat the mistake of abbr and acronym with article and section.

I hereby declare April to be HTML5 Month …at least for me. I’m about to embark to on a month of markup pedagogy. I’ll be expounding on the language features of HTML5 at various locations across meat- and cyberspace.

It all starts on April 7th in Seattle. That’s where I’ll be delivering one half of A Day Apart. My brother in arms, Dan the CSS3 Man, will be delivering the other half. While An Event Apart itself has sold out, workshop places are still available so if you’re going to be anywhere near the emerald city, grab a ticket for $449.

After that, my next HTML5 appearance will be virtual. You can join me on April 12th for the first hour of the HTML5 Online Conference. I’ll be setting the scene and acting as warm-up man for Bruce, Peter and Remy. It’s not quite the same as being in the same room as such luminaries, but it won’t increase your carbon footprint. You can get a ticket for $150.

Finally, my pièce de résistance on April 23rd will be a full-day workshop on HTML5 for Web Designers. Don’t let the title fool you; it just means that I’ll be dealing with semantics, structural elements, audio, video, input types and outline algorithms rather than offline storage, canvas or drag’n’drop: language features rather than platform features, mostly. The workshop will take place at the rather excellent Lighthouse facilities right here in Brighton, in the same building as the Clearleft office. Book your place for £395 (or £195 if you’re a student).

I’m going to be living and breathing HTML5 for most of April. If all goes according to plan, the month will be topped off with the first publication from A Book Apart.

More on that later…

Yahoo! Application Platform - YDN

This sounds like Yahoo's answer to Facebook Platform for single web pages or (spit!) widgets. We'll see if the reality matches the hype. "The Yahoo! Application Platform allows you to build and launch open-social applications to the largest daily …