HTML5 Specification on HTML5 in 24 Hours

Blink and you missed it. TIME element back in the HTML5 spec

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:10:16 +0000

from: Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 Mobile Application Development in 24 Hours

After a large uproar by designers and developers last week when they removed the HTML5 TIME element, the W3C recanted and put it back in the spec. So you don’t have to replace TIME with DATA, but you can if you want to.

This corrects last week’s errata post. The book still contains the TIME element, but does not contain the DATA element.

What’s really great is that this shows that the W3C is listening to us. So if there is some other problem with the HTML5 spec, don’t be shy—let them know. If enough agree, your change may happen!

Borders on tables now ok in HTML5

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:05:05 +0000

If you use tables (not for layout, of course) it can be very tedious to get the borders to surround every cell using CSS. You need to set the border on the table and on every th and td, and then collapse the borders with border-collapse. I don’t know about you, but I would often just add the border attribute to the table, just to get it done quickly.

Well, this week the HTML5 working group decided to make that okay again. They agreed that many tables need to have borders to define the cells. The proposal pointed out that putting CSS on a table to define the borders would not be carried over when the table was moved between implementations. In other words, if you wrote a table in an HTML document, and then ported that document into XML, the borders in CSS would stay with the CSS, not with the table.

Now it is legal to write `<table border>` to add borders around your table and table cells. I, for one, am pleased!

Comments:

Steven K. Mariner - Mar 5, 2015

This is good news and a welcome relief. I was starting to wonder if the fine folks who worked on the HTML5 standard even used HTML anymore. The insane amount of overhead required by the use of CSS to do everything suggested they have forgotten that sometimes *people* make web sites, and mobile devices have to load them *slowly*. Mandatory content increase is a bad idea, and HTML5 is littered with it.

HTML5 last call now has a date

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:29:57 +0000

According to IT Pro, the W3C has set a deadline of May 24, 2011 for the last issues to be delivered about the HTML5 specification.

This is exciting news for the standard, as it means that browser makers will start building to it in earnest, web designers can be more confident that the sites they build won’t need hacks, and HTML5 will grow in popularity and importance.