I haven't been following the HTML5 effort Neither has anyone. The HTML standard has been dormant for seven or eight years. That's nearly a lifetime ago. (Liter

I haven't been following the HTML5 effort Neither has anyone. The HTML standard has been dormant for seven or eight years. That's nearly a lifetime ago. (Literally -- at Drupalcon we had a lecture on jQuery from a twelve-year-old.) The web standards folks are like the anti-DHH: Their development cycle is "release late and infrequently". We all fell asleep a long time ago, waiting for these guys to actually release something we can use. Admittedly, the endless delay is not the standardistas' fault. The elephant in the room is that you can't really make progress in Web standards by refining the standards: They're not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is getting MS to conform to the standard, and you could interpret the last eight years as a long struggle to construct a critical mass of standards-compliant browsers and pages, such that MS has no choice but to take notice. It's been an epic battle, akin to Stallman's effort to construct a free operating system from scratch, so it took a while. But the battle seems to be getting won, thank god. And I'm happy to read the occasional cheerful article, like this one, which assures me that the future is looking good, and that everyone is finally ready to join hands and sing. But then I have to go back to work, every day, and remind myself of how broken the standards are as I struggle to port designs to IE. The optimism wears off quickly. This damned broken browser apparently has an 80% market share, so I have no choice. It's like trying to change tires with your teeth, I have to do it every single week, and it makes me royally pissed. And that's why I like Joel's article. No, he doesn't see things from the perspective of an optimistic member of the HTML5 team. He sees things from my perspective, from the outside, where the situation sucks and has sucked for nearly a decade and where an honest extrapolation predicts further suckage despite all the sunny promises. I'm not going to credit Microsoft and the HTML5 team with a solution to this problem until the solution has shipped and has significant marketshare, because I'm in pain, and help has been on the way for a very, very long time.