HTML5 crazy
HTML5 has gone from 0 to 60 in maybe three weeks. waffle → Now in glorious HTML5 (via daringfireball). I'm skeptical of trying to standardize "semantic markup" because everyone has their own ideas about structure. People forget that when we write HTML, we're tagging text, the same way that we tag photos on flickr or links on del.icio.us. Tagging works in the aggregate, but isn't a precise labeling solution for small sets of stuff. or, one person's <article> is another's <section>, and it's ridiculous to expect people to use a language like HTML uniformly.
If they're going to introduce namby-pamby tags like <article>, we should just all start making our own custom XML schemas. Then the nitpickers could stop whining about having to shoehorn web content into inaccurate markup. </pseudo-sarcasm> And how much of our "structure" is subjective as far as our supposed machine audience is concerned? Wouldn't popularizing some semantic XML schemas for things like blogs, articles, calendars, addresses—like microformats but in namespaced xml—be both more flexible and more useful?
Long and short: HTML won't ever fit all web sites semantically (where do semantic tags fit in web apps?). Either we can continue to live with imperfect tagging (works fine for me, now) or we can make some precise definitions for specific types of data (also fine by me: I'm imagining DreamWeaver with an "Insert Address" button, etc.)
