It’s been a few days since I wrote my post (and comic) entitled The Value of Meaning, wherein I registered my objection to Divya Manian’s article about HTML5 semantics called Our Pointless Pursuit of Semantic Value. In that time there’s been a great deal of continuing discussion on the topic from a lot of intelligent people that’s worth pointing out in case you missed it.

• Firstly, there was a great comment thread on my post including voices such as Divya’s. Check it out.
• In particular, you should read John Foliot’s response at the end.
• Jeremy Keith’s Pursuing Semantic Value is a must-read. In it he agrees with Divya’s core message, notes an issue with tone, and guides you through the process of where his agreement with that core message takes him to a very different conclusion.
• Steve Faulkner replies to Jeremy’s article with a comment that grows up to being a full-sized article of its own: HTML5 Semantics and Accessibility.
• Paul Irish, a veritable Chuck Norris of web development, also wrote in response to Jeremy Keith with Semantics in practice and mapping semantic value to its consumers.
• John Foliot responds to Divya in a detailed, no-holds barred post that examines the merit (or lack thereof) of her speaking points about semantics in My Thing About the Thing That Thing Wrote About Thing.

If you have time, you should read all of these. They’re all written by intelligent people getting into the heart of the HTML5 semantics debate with more clarity and detail than I could ever manage.

Edit: Roughly twenty minutes after I posted this, the W3C took action on the issue, insisting that the <time> element be placed back into the specification. You can read about it here. But please read on. It’s a good primer for the next time something like this happens.

Contrary to what you may have already heard, the <time> element hasn’t disappeared from HTML.

Yes, officially <time> is currently not part of the HTML spec. (Thanks to the muddle that is “HTML Living Specification” I’ll be honest and admit I’m not sure if is no longer part of HTML5 or it’s in some sort of Schrodinger’s Cat quantum-zombie state of existing in HTML5 but missing in the “ongoing HTML” that the WHATWG is proud to keep rolling down the conveyor belt.)

That doesn’t mean it’s not being used by authors (how’s Drupal builds, 2.6 million WordPress installs and the Boston Globe for you?) nor does it mean that is it not being used by user agents (ever-plucky Opera supports it).

What it means is that a single human being has decided that he doesn’t care for time one wit, and that a rather vague element called <data> can replace it instead.

This human is none other than Ian “The Benign Leviathan Dictator For Life” Hixie, editor for the HTML specification.

I could give you an explanation on how this scenario came to exist, but two Brits who are far more informed than I am (and likely slightly smarter) have made their own summaries. If you like knowing what’s going on (and I do) then go read them. These pair of fine gentlemen, Jeremy Keith and Bruce Lawson, both guest star in today’s comic as the good Doctor thanks to a little spot of regeneration, where they’re fighting the good fight against Hixie’s <data>leks.

Virtually every problem I have with a single person wielding so much power over such a fundamentally important pillar of the web as HTML can be summed up in this incident. <Time> is officially out, despite the lack of merit or consensus in that decision. And it took just one man to make that happen. Either through a lack of awareness or a genuine disregard for what authors are already doing, Ian has claimed incorrectly that <time> isn’t seeing adoption, isn’t useful, and should be canned. And because the only balance to his power is a rather tedious process to oust him, there’s no official remedy to bringing <time> back into the HTML fold than trying to convince him that its existence is a good thing.

From what I understand, it’s easier to keep red shirts alive on away missions than it is to change Ian’s opinion on something.

Fortunately, there’s a big difference between having no official remedy and having no remedy whatsoever.

As “authors”, we are the 99% of HTML5. We can follow Jeremy Keith’s sage advice:

We can make a stand and simply carry on using the time element in our web pages. If we do, then we’ll see more parsers and browsers implementing support for the time element. The fact that our documentation has been ripped away makes this trickier but it’s such a demonstrably useful addition to HTML that we cannot afford to throw it away based on the faulty logic of one person.

So as I said, <time> hasn’t disappeared from HTML. It’s still there on millions of sites already. And nothing is stopping us from putting it on millions more. It’s our chance to send those <data>leks packing. As soon as this post is finished I’m going to edit my site’s theme to make use of <time>. Hixie can go stuff it.

Occupy HTML5.

Featuring Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith and Dave Shea, today’s comic highlights what makes good people on the Internet into great people.

Humanity, it seems, is destined to fight with itself over every little detail. That’s probably not new information to you.

Thanks to the Internet, we don’t even need stamps or to be in someone’s physical presence to have these arguments. As anyone with a net connection knows, this means we will get into heated, acrimonious fights over topics as unimportant as who the hell was Papa Smurf’s partner in creating his dozens of smurf offspring. And we’ll stew over it. And we’ll 386 someone because of it. And we’ll lose sleep and remove friends from Facebook over it.

As as developer/designer who follows the same category of people on Twitter, many of the Internet fights I witness involve web standards, the tools we use as developers, the erotic-sounding but thoroughly disappointing topic of hashbangs and anything in between. Heck, I participate in these brawls, throwing acorns at the whole mess.

There’s a lot of reasons for these fights, but most often we argue because we care. The products we make as professionals mean a lot to us. We want the best for our medium and our industry, and so we get trenchant about Flash, HTML5, naming conventions, design techniques or the proper shade of blue. Because to us it matters. It matters a lot. And there is nothing wrong with that level of passion about your work. Quite the opposite. If you can’t imagine yourself fiercely defending what you do as an occupation, maybe you need a different career.

However, in the process we frequently seem to forget that we’re dealing with other people. Passionate people, some of which are just as informed as we are. Or even more so. And believe it or not, they’re entitled to have arrived at different conclusions than us. Yet, so often something about the Internet seems to boil away the concept of the right to respectfully disagree.

Last week, Zeldman and Keith got into a debate over a blog post by Andy Rutledge on the subject of Kickstarter. At times it seemed heated, and due to the nature of the medium they were debating in it was both very public and very abrupt. Then the next day Zeldman posted a series of tweets carefully reiterating his view, made it clear that Keith was his friend and simply saying “sorry” for the whole confusion. In front of an audience of 144,000 followers. Jeremy replied in the same vein.

It shouldn’t seem amazing that two people apologize over a fight in public. But somehow, on today’s Internet, it’s all but unheard of.

There’s a strange comfort in knowing that our Internet heroes are just as capable of the same fallacies we are.

It’s inspiring to see them follow it up by providing good examples by rising to a level of good behavior we rarely get to witness in social media today.

I’ve termed this sudden cessation of hostilities (without ceding the value of each party’s opinions) as a “nacho moment“, so named thanks to a moment of intentional, deliberate hilarity by Dave Shea best summarized by this pair of tweets. It’s a testament to his actions that I don’t even recall what large debate was going on before his tweets, but do know that afterward the Internet got a little less contentious and the Seattle area’s nacho sales rose just a bit.

Don’t stop caring about the things you care about, whether it’s the Smurfs or funding crowdsourcing. But when you’re in a debate, have a nacho moment and remember you’re talking to other people. People who also care.

Today the W3C unveiled its new logo for HTML5. As you might notice, it’s quite fancy.

The site’s pretty slick, as well.

Today’s comic relates to this new logo, in a roundabout way, featuring Jeremy Keith, Bruce Lawson (or perhaps it’s Super Bruce) and Remy Sharp (Or is it SuperHTML5Rem?) in their guises as HTML5 Super Friends, attempting to save the web from itself. It also refers to a slippery terminology slope.

The FAQ page for the new logo (yes, it gets its own FAQ) includes a little mention about what the logo represents. Which is obvious: HTML5, right? Well, apparently HTML5 doesn’t stand for Hyper Text Markup Language anymore. But apparently its all for “a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.”

Say what? I’m with Jeremy and Bruce on this one. The logo is pretty, but the intentional use of HTML5 as a blanket term for other modern web technologies is a crock. Newspapers making merry with the term is one thing, but a web standards organization? We rely on these groups to keep our handy developer toys in nice, cleanly demarcated buckets so that we can easily educate ourselves and the next generation of developers on what toy is used for what job and how.

I could rant on this for hours. But I recommend reading at minimum Jeremy’s bit on the topic. He manages to be far more eloquent with his words and has earned his place as a bit of an authority on the topic. So maybe you’ll value his two cents more highly. All I know is that when I used to say “HTML5″ people knew what I meant. At least in my own community of website creators. But now it’s as meaningless as “doohicky.” As in, “Are you talking about the doohicky that I style pages with or the doohicky that I make the structure with?”

TL;DR Version: Love the logo, hate the term-squishing.

As a parting shot, I object to Karl Dubost’s characterization of term-blurring opponents’ commentary as “vapid“. I’m sure Jeremy Keith is capable of a lot of things when writing, but even if you disagree with his viewpoint on the topic, his well reasoned rhetoric doesn’t merit such a label. Shame on you, Karl.

Today’s comic features the year 1991, where a time-traveling Jeremy Keith, a younger John Foliot sporting a ponytail and Vanilla Ice are involved in a pivotal moment of history that would make or break Sir Tim’s invention of HTML.

I am reliably informed by those involved that my version of events is remarkably close to the truth. -cough- Really.

Two things made today’s comic possible. The first is this glorious snapshot of history: John Foliot hanging with Vanilla Ice. You’ll note Foliot had that brilliant mustache even in the early nineties. I also couldn’t help but notice Ice’s immaculate eyebrows.

The second is this post by Jeremy Keith on the subject of Hypertext History, where he discusses wwilfing his way to the early history of HTML and gazing upon the source code of the very first document published on the web. What’s really neat is his discovery that the page essentially validates as HTML5. Gadzooks!

Lest ye think he or I are saying Sir Tim was some sort of web prophet predicting HTML5, consider this response by Zeldman on that very topic. The fact is, HTML5 is meant to stretch backwards to be compatible with the best practices of the past while embracing the future. If that spec works so well with the earliest pages, then job well done, folks.

Both the first website and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 appeared to the world in 1991. I was fourteen, a coding geek, and a massive TMNT fan. But even at that young age, something didn’t quite sit right with Vanilla Ice’s random musical segment inserted into my turtle movie experience. Yet, as today’s comic implies, maybe that was for the best. Maybe Ice did us all a favor. Or maybe not.

Take a gander and decide for yourself.