larlet-fr-david-cache/cache/c767299015aacd265652750d66d1f5e3/index.md

title: </html> url: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/06/05/End-of-HTML hash_url: c767299015

Item: The W3C HTML Work­ing Group char­ter is ex­pir­ing.
Item: Dis­cus­sion on what to do is in­con­clu­sive.
Item: Things are pret­ty qui­et in the WhatWG.
Con­clu­sion: The best thing to do about HTML is noth­ing.

As Sam Ru­by points out, in­ter­est in work on “vocabulary” (by which they mean the ac­tu­al angle-bracketed thin­gies that go in­to HTML) seems pret­ty lack­ing.

Me, I think HTML is done. Which doesn’t mean I think that the whole Web-programming plat­form is in a good state:

(I post­ed this on Twit­ter a year or two ago.)

The browser-as-a-platform is based on a lousy pro­gram­ming lan­guage ad­dress­ing a lousy ob­ject mod­el and us­ing a lousy stylesheet lan­guage for vi­su­al­s. Each of those could and should be re­placed by some­thing bet­ter. HTML? Not per­fec­t, but plen­ty good enough.

Not on­ly is HTML fin­ished; Even if we want­ed to im­prove it, there are no ob­vi­ous can­di­dates to do the work. The W3C has re­peat­ed­ly walked down blind HTML al­leys. The WhatWG mod­el was nev­er re­mote­ly sus­tain­able.

Let’s down tools and fo­cus on more im­por­tant prob­lem­s.