On speaking to .net, Roselli said that HTML5 “as a brand versus the name of the version of a particular specification” already causes confusion, not only with clients but also developers. “I suffered through this with DHTML and Web 2.0, and those weren’t even real specifications. I expect to continue to deal with it with HTML5.” He told us that new developers may not even be taught the differences, partly because the educators themselves don’t know.” As these devs come into the workforce and get direction from clients or non-technical supervisors to lean on HTML5 for a project, they may not understand that the marketing term ‘HTML5′ is just the latest variation on ‘DHTML’ or ‘Web 2.0′ and presume they are being directed to use one specification. They may spend far too much time rebuilding capability in script, or perhaps just failing at trying to address it, when a related specification already exists.”

I kind of agree in theory — confusing technical specs with buzzwords can make life difficult for developers in all sorts of ways — but I think this is just a difficultly we’re going to have to live with. I don’t think it’s too difficult, when speaking about the technical aspects of web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 et al, to explicitly make clear that we’re concerning ourselves with the specification of those technologies.

I have conversations with decision-makers on a fairly regular basis, who band around the phrase “HTML5″ to communicate what they’re anticipating for a project, and that’s fine with me. When it comes to actually sitting down to spec a particular project though, that’s when individual technologies are defined and ratified.

In the original post, Adrian states:

I am repeating a request that when we who know better (developers, tech writers, robots named Frank) speak about discrete specifications, we refer to them as such.

I agree with this. But here’s a question: what umbrella term should we use for these specifications? Modern web technologies do represent a major sea-change in the way we’re approaching things, and I feel we need a catch-all term to refer to them, for both technical and non-technical people. Some developers might have hated the terms DHTML and Web 2.0, but at least they gave us a common language which could be understood across disciplines; you could “get” the gist of what was being talked about.

Today we are adding two major new features to our HTML5 widgets – Comments and Likes. This means that from now on you’re able to comment on sounds embedded anywhere on the web and you can save them as a favorite on SoundCloud too.

Also, we are proud to announce that today we are officially switching our default widget to be the HTML5 widget. We also know that our major partners plan to support it in the near future. Of course the old Flash widget will be still available if you need it as an alternative option.

This is great news for the ongoing rollout of HTML5 in the wild and is a great example of what the technology can be capable of. There’s still a Flash fallback too, so it’s not like moving to HTML5 means that any users are locked out.

What it does not do is take advantage of those things that online products can deliver which a paper cannot. Search, for instance, is absent – trying to find out whether today’s Times has an article on a particular subject means flicking through every section.

More seriously, the app is not a “live” newspaper – what you get each morning is the edition that went to bed about the time you did. Take today’s iPad Times for instance. There is a long article about Apple and the challenges it faces from rivals now that Steve Jobs is taking sick leave.

But not only does it quote a share price that is way out of date – the 6% fall at Tuesday’s NASDAQ opening – it also fails to mention the startlingly good results published at 2130 GMT on Tuesday evening.

This shows exactly why the old print model just doesn’t translate effectively to the digital world — modern-day journalism needs to be responsive; be more relevant.

News groups appear to be groping in the dark, unsure of what readers want from an app.

What readers want from an app is what readers have been getting from the web: searchable, relevant, up-to-date journalism and content. But they want that experience to be enhanced through the use of intelligent, intuitive design which digital devices can provide.

And now it is quite easy to see why the media apps are failing. They are all difficult to navigate requiring too many swipes, flicks and scrolls to find things. Eureka has a lovely opening navigation and the magazines have contents pages but where are the search bars? Have they learnt nothing from the web? Where are the related articles, tags and comments. They are not taking advantage of the fundamental tools available to them. Instead they are creating gimmicky apps without any real substance. Media companies are changing but without realising what is their best asset, their quality journalism and ability to edit, which they sacrifice to fads and pointless interactive content. Newspaper and magazine sales are down because the internet allows easy consumption and access to lots of information; the only way to start making money is by championing this in their apps and combining with excellent user-interface and editorial design. At the moment there isn’t an app which is better to use than the newspaper or website equivalent and this should be worrying to an ailing industry. The approach is entirely wrong; it is not the content that is the problem, it’s the way it’s being presented.

I’ve, personally, yet to find a media app which feels “right” — even the very popular and innovative Flipboard doesn’t fit the bill, for the may of the reasons that Oliver flags up: too many swipes, no way to effectively filter and search.

I think this difference makes it clearer what each group is doing. It was a pretty confusing situation to have two groups working on two specs, both called HTML5. Now it’s clear that the WHATWG is working more like how browsers do: constantly evolving and implementing features rather than entire specifications. Meanwhile the W3C are working on having a development milestone of those features set in stone and labelled as the fifth revision to the HTML language …and I think that is also an important and worthy goal.

Meanwhile, Tantek Çelik passes comment on what this recent hiccup means for the W3C:

This was the perfect opportunity for W3C to stand up, show adherence to principles of precision, clarity, and provide leadership as their mission statement claims they (want to) do. All the things you would expect from a world-class standards organization.

They’ve done the opposite on all counts. Instead of providing precision and clarity, they’ve muddied the definition of HTML5 further with yet another “here’sour bucket of things we like which we’re going to call ‘HTML5′” message. Instead of leading they’ve followed the marketing messages from large corporations.

W3C’s Communications Team has failed us horribly and have only added to market confusion as to what “HTML5″ is.

But, of course, like most people who threaten to leave and become clean: I realised I was addicted.

And of course, I’ve been clinging on by rationalising my Facebook addiction by using that age-old excuse: it’s an easy way to keep in touch with people. Bu really? A lot of the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook I haven’t spoken to in years — nor do I really want to speak to them. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just that people move on; friends come and go; some keep in touch, others float away. Why do we feel the need to cling on to everybody, all of the time? I don’t need Facebook to keep me in touch with the people I care about: I have telephone numbers, email, skype, postal addresses for all of those people anyway.

What really swung me though, what really snapped me into cold realisation was reading this essay by Zadie Smith. It’s a fascinating, lengthy read. There’s some really insightful, philosophical thinking contained in there, but this particular passage really got me thinking:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

I’ve realised that when it comes down to it, it’s not the content of my Facebook feed which I have a gripe with — after all: I choose who my friends are, and I choose to read or not read what’s going on in my social network. No, it’s the idea of my virtual personality being diluted down to a prescribed format; having my online activities influenced by omnipotent software; essentially, having my online self owned. Facebook has been created as a vision of an idealistic future dictated by one man: Mark Zuckerberg. I find that really quite scary, because history teaches us that one-man dictatorships can have a huge influence over societies, and the authority they wield can make people do horrible things.

So, I’m going to be exporting my data, updating my address book and then I’ll be leaving the hive mind. Don’t worry, I’ll still be able to keep tabs on you all if I like; I can always take one more hit by just running a search for you in Google. It’s likely that Facebook’s default privacy settings are broadcasting your every activity to the wider world, right now.

It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write. It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It’s the standard’s standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn’t use tables for layout.

Seems like an admirable initiative on the surface of it, but you only have to pass a cursory glance over the FAQ to see why this logo has got so many people wound up:

The logo is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.

The problem is that HTML5 shouldn’t be used as an umbrella term for a group of associated technologies. HTML5 is a markup language, and using the term to describe a group of other technologies is just wrong. Jeremy Keith summarises the gripes with this misappropriation:

What we have here is a deliberate attempt to further blur the lines between separate technologies that have already become intertwingled in media reports.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind if marketers and journalists use HTML5 to mean everything under the sun, but I expect working web developers to be able to keep specs separate in their mind. If Apple or Google were pushing this kind of fuzziness, I wouldn’t mind …but this is coming straight from the horse’s mouth (or, in this case, straight from the horse’s ass).

This logo branding nonsense is a real clanger by the W3C. Rather of quietly than facilitating the wider adoption and standardisation of web technologies, instead they’re trying to evangelise and influence the web ecosystem at the expense of muddying already murky waters.

The W3C strayed way off the path of web innovation when it set about specifying XHTML, and it took the strong-arming of WHATWG to get HTML5 back on the agenda at W3C. WHATWG has always been more responsive to what browser vendors and web developers are demanding by “paving the cowpaths”. Looks like this little branding exercise might just have been the catalyst for another shift in their approach.

While the W3C are making pretty pictures, WHATWG have announced:

The HTML specification will henceforth just be known as “HTML”, with the URL http://whatwg.org/html. (We will also continue to maintain the Web Applications 1.0 specification that contains HTML and a number of related APIs like Web Storage, Web Workers, and Server-Sent Events.)

The WHATWG HTML spec can now be considered a “living standard”. It’s more mature than any version of the HTML specification to date, so it made no sense for us to keep referring to it as merely a draft. We will no longer be following the “snapshot” model of spec development, with the occasional “call for comments”, “call for implementations”, and so forth.

What this means is that the version numbering of HTML will be dropped: HTML5 will now just be referred to as HTML. It also means that as of now, WHATWG are considering their specification to be a standard — it will change, mature and evolve over time, but what they’re essentially is: the new version of HTML is production-ready.

This is a significant shift and it makes a lot of sense: most switched-on web developers have been using the new standard for quite some time.

UPDATE: Appears that the W3C have listened to the cacophony of noise surrounding their definition of what the HTML5 logo represents, and they’ve changed the FAQ to define it as:

This logo represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications.

This is a good thing. But has the damage already been done? Has the W3C already tarred their reputation by showing themselves to be out of touch with opinion in the web development world (which can be vociferous at best)?