The astounding Neon Night-Rider and the return of the web

And hopefully this will be my last discussion on the subject. You’ve seen it enough times (if you haven’t, I envy you). HTML5: 2022 (aka 2012). This created yet another pointless rift that I was temporarily part of last year where some people don’t want to touch it until 2022 and others are using it now. You know, I really hate the web. Why is this even a divisive issue I don’t know, but it is, it created an inane Twitter war between me and some agency where we both drank our respective Kool-Aid (I refused to support something that by the time it’s even in Candidate Recommendation will be outdated by some other new shiny object and they/he started using it immediately, or so they claimed.) and I did the adult thing, apologized, and tried to make amends. Didn’t happen, but that isn’t anything new. Of all the things I’ve read about HTML5, my favorite is this comment: “Hopefully, I’ll be retired by then.” Me, too.

HTML5 looks nice, new, and shiny, and in the foreseeable future I could start using it. But I could also not because I hate hackish implementation methods like using Javascript to supplement a browser’s lack of support. I’m an accessibility guy; why would I dig my own grave by making something that’ll only work with Javascript? Oh, well, HTML5 found a way to at least provide us with something so that we don’t have to use XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01. But there are plenty of hackish methods present already to get it to work, like the whole <div> in the <header> nonsense. And there’s still an argument about <b> and <i>, which to me are totally asinine, but that’ll make me some Microsoft-loving, close-minded, unwilling-to-change fool and my credibility lost and nobody except my customers, the people who don’t really care about what technologies I use, will want to work with me. Okay, so only the people who will pay me want to work with me? Sounds good to me.

Perhaps I’ll be more willing to participate further in this argument if I wanted my career to stay in code monkey hell and there weren’t numerous other issues to worry about, like legacy browsers, companies slow to adopt modern practices, etc. People complained on Smashing Magazine that the W3C was slow to keep up with modern internet. How are we keeping up with modern internet when most major companies are behind the already-behind point we’re trying to get past? How many readers work for large corporate companies? How long did it take for them to change their websites (in some cases, that’s still yet to happen)? And guess what? They’re still promoting IE, so who is “modern?” Agencies? Doubtful. Those companies only react to what’s existing. I’ve yet to see one pioneer “modern” web. So who’s first? Google? Apple? I can’t agree with that.

I never thought Apple was revolutionary in anything except their marketing tactics, but you know how I know “revolutionary” web is nonexistent? If people were really forward-thinking and liked technology, why do Apple users act like I don’t exist when I say I use Linux full-time? Despite that both are Unix-based, somehow I’m not trendy or cool enough, although the majority of web servers run on Linux, and any hosting you buy almost always comes with different Linux flavors. For the longest time, XAMP servers were utterly worthless, and I believe they still are. Why would I pay $2000 for a machine with bells and whistles on a web server when I can get something cheap, up-to-date, and barebones like a server is supposed to be.

And what about Google? Well, according to Google, I shouldn’t be wasting my time jumping and singing over new technology if nobody outside of the microcosm of frontend web developers is going to care. And one of the longest-lasting sites, Web Pages That Suck, also has this sentiment. I honestly didn’t build tableless/full-CSS sites until 2007 (although I did do it once in 2004). But you know what? I was still building websites and still employed. HTML5 is turning into the same nonsensical catalyst to war. Hey, before we worry about that, how about we worry about fixing what we have now? HTML5 isn’t going to fix pre-existing problems. If Wordpress, one of the most “forward-thinking” applications, requires me to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional because its RTE still uses target=”_blank” and won’t let me use Javascript to open a new window, why should there even be arguments about HTML5?

Sure, in two years we should see it in more browsers, but we also got to get rid of the old ones, and IE6 is still lurking around 9 years later. Even if you get rid of it, guess what? Mobile IE users are next. Legacy systems and apps aren’t going away, no matter how costly it is to support them. I can get away with telling IE6 users not to view my blog because I don’t get many readers and 90% of them don’t stick around. And the highest amount of traffic goes to my Pear Analytics post and my Clear WiMAX review. And out of all those readers, I got a whopping 2 comments total for both posts. After that, my San Antonio vs. Austin article, the only non-tech post I’ve made to get such feedback. All of these are nowhere near high discussion material, yet these are all that’s discussed.

So, 2012 is right around the corner, and I doubt I’ll retire at age 26, but maybe in 2022, at 36, I can finally leave this industry and go back to my personal life, back before I had to read “sent from my iPhone/Blackberry/Android” comments before carriers thought we really cared about how a message was sent to us. I’ll inevitably use HTML5, when I think it’s necessary, but it’s no longer worth discussion. HTML since I’ve started has barely made a change. Only when CSS came onto the scene did it look new and interesting, but it was still the same HTML we used back when we coded with tables give or take a few tags that were added. If it feels different, then that makes a sad commentary on how early web development was, but the truth is that we changed and improved more than the tools we used.

Tags: html5 argument, rants, web development

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