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HTML Needs New Tags

I am a firm believer of standard based software development. When it comes to web standards such as HTML and JavaScript, I should also add that the standards need to evolve. The way the web standards evolve is through experiments of their implementations. That's why I was excited about the Mozilla canvas tag when it first appeared. That's why I'm excited about the video tag that Brendan Eich, the King of Mozilladom, mentions in his blog:

Brendan Eich: From the inimitable Chris Double of Mozilla's New Zealand brain trust: moving, rotating, scaling <video> in SVG (so who needs yet another non-standard plugin?).

It is true that these tags are not part of the HTML standard, yet. But there is no reason why they can't be. It may take some time before all the vendors agree on the exact syntax. Some vendors may even resist the incorporation of such innovations. But at the end of the day, it is the usefulness of these new tags that will attract web content developers, and through them, the web content consumers.

As to the comment "Why needs yet another non-standard plugin?" The answer is "Mozilla has always needed non-standard plugins." Try removing all non-standard plugins from your browser and see if the web still "works"? The trick is to standardize the access to such plugins in a way that promotes competition and prevents lock-ins.

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Re: HTML Needs New Tags

HTML is horrible as is. I think the line between content and presentation is nonexistent at this point - just try looking at the HTML sources of most generated pages, or pages with DHTML. It's unreadable! I'd like to see a HTML change to a language that described how content was presented in great detail, and then have it embed the actual content (which would have minimal markup and just refer to styles defined in the HTML). So for example, you could define a page with text flowing in front of an image and not have the image referenced anywhere in the text portion. Or you could have several paragraphs with all sorts of decoration in between, and the text would remain text.

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