Bruce Lawson's personal site

To commemorate the fact that HTML5 has been renamed HTML (at least by the WHATWG, but not by the W3C) and “the WHATWG HTML spec can now be considered a ‘living standard'”, it seemed only right to unleash The Axe Of Glory™ (my acoustic guitar) for another song.

Serious bit: the lyrics are just a bit of fun. I don’t really believe that if you dislike this change you’re inferior or that concensus-denyin’ is always a good spec development model. This is mostly to give me a video to test the new vid.ly service, that converts and hosts the video for HTML5 browsers with a Flash fallback. (It does a good job, but oddly serves Ogg video to Opera 11 rather than webM and its HTML email to tell you that conversion is complete is badly broken.)

So, with that said and with apologies to Sir Clifford of Richard and Lionel Bart, here is my new song, “Living Standard”.

Sing along.

If the video isn’t working, watch it on YouTube.

Got myself an always-evolving, problem-solving Living Standard
much better than Five, cos it’s alive, my Living Standard.
Superior persons don’t need a version, so Hixie canned it!
Got myself a cowpath-pavin’ Open-web savin’ Living Standard.

Take a look at the spec, it’s vast.
If you don’t believe what it says, you’re so past.
Gonna love that spec, so no proprietary tech
can steal the Web from me.

Got myself a never-completin’, concensus-defeatin’ Living Standard
much better than Five, cos it’s alive, my Living Standard.
Superior persons don’t need a version, so Hixie canned it!
Got myself a error-correctin’ numeral-rejectin’ living standard.

I did a talk last week for London Web on the history and philosophies of HTML5, largely prompted by recent developments like Google Chrome dropping support for H.666 video, the renaming of “HTML5” to plain “HTML” and the silliness of the HTML5 logo.

Watch “The Zen of HTML5” on the Opera Developer Network, with loads of resources to get you going. (“Get you going” in a “get you started” way, not in a viagra way.)

The W3C has released a logo for HTML5. I’ve been broadly supportive of this since I was told about it last year, but can’t help feeling a little disappointed that wrapped up in there are references to CSS in there.

Mashable reports that

logo designer Michael Nieling said in a statement, “The term HTML5 has taken on a life of its own; there has been significant confusion…as to what exactly HTML5 is when the term is used outside of simply referring to the spec itself”

Quite.

In order to alleviate that confusion, let me point again to my video rant HTML5 != CSS3 rant:

For more on this, see Two cheers for the W3C’s HTML5 logo.

But I’m not going to be churlish; I shall be putting the badge on this site too. And getting the new outfit that Cole Henley so kindly mocked up for me.

If you’d like HTML5 badges to appear by magic on sites with an HTML5 doctype, my friend and fellow Operative @ourmaninjapan has an Opera Extension. For those with other browsers, he has a Greasemonkey/UserJS.

(Last Updated on 24 January 2011)