HTML5 and me
I’ve just spent the last week or so working on a HTML5 template and have noticed some difficulties which probably mean that it will remain a future language for the time being.
I found that implementing the big landmark elements was OK. I’ve included the new “header”,”nav”, “aside” and “footer” elements without any real issues however headers and footers as children of “articles” are problematic going forward when it comes to CSS hooks.
I found generally that the new elements still need supporting mark-up (container divs etc) as it’s not possible to use them as hooks with backward compatibility to the older browsers like IE6. The result is that the mark-up is bloated and unnecessarily verbose with an overall reduction in flexibility and human readability. This combined with the addition of WAI-ARIA landmark roles makes for a confusing and difficult to read document at the code level.
For example I have an area of my document that has an element of header with and identity of “branding” and a ARIA role of “banner”. It would have been nice if WC3 consulted internally before forking the semantics to two different words i.e. Header and Banner. It’s just unnecessary.
Other really useful things like forms 2.0 are currently not properly support going backwards and probably won’t be for a while until IE6 dies off in the wild.
It’s one to watch for now. Comments are most welcome.
