More Crockford

Douglas Crockford did an interview with sitepoint.com discussing the "Web Forward!" talk that I posted yesterday.

One key point I wanted to highlight:

What I see happening now with HTML5 is appalling. There is some stuff there that I really like: I really like that they figured out what the rules of HTML parsing are. Brilliant. That's long overdue. And you can look at any individual feature that they're doing and say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” But there’s just too much, and there’s not a good set of trade-offs, there’s not a complexity budget. It’s not motivated by real need, but by what’s shiny in front of a committee.

I had the same observation. The web doesn't need more features, it needs more focus and discipline. Right now, thankfully, we have JavaScript toolkits to shield us from a lot of this, but that landscape is fractured as well, and new developers have to wade through the muck to figure out what works best for them.

So with HTML5, rather than standardizing declarative parts of JavaScript libraries like dojoML into HTML, we have initiatives to incorporate audio and video tags, embedding local SQL databases, and multiplying the div tag into a million different semantics (section AND article?). Is that really what the web is crying out for? Or are we all just looking for some consensus on how to create a three column layout with a header and footer, without writing 30 lines of CSS?