5 ms·

Ruby on Rails default templates now comes with HTML5 doctype

51 points by laktek 17y ago

Corrado 17y ago
Ok what's the downside to using the new doctag? What about old IE6 users? I have a new site going online tomorrow and would be willing to go HTML5 as long as it won't kill older browsers.
- ned 17y ago
  You mean a doctype. IE6 users won't be affected if you declare the HTML5 elements in JS, as described here: http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-firefox-2/ http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi...
laktek 17y ago
Also, tag helpers for audio and video HTML5 tags have been pushed to edge rails - http://bit.ly/PGV5B http://bit.ly/PGV5B So doctype change must've been made mainly to support these tags.
pilif 17y ago
this is not at all related to the essence of the commit, but as the rails guys are using git which brings us the beauty that is rebase -i, why is this commit so incredibly bad? It mixes functional changes and whitespace changes. It even contains functional changes not related to the commit message. I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one. I know. Just nitpicking, but having the possibility of creating "clean" commits in a reasonable amount of time is one of the nice features of git. Why not use them?
- lzell 17y ago
  "I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one." Never? Are your deadlines infinitely flexible? I try my best to adhere to single purpose commits too, but being under the gun I know I've slipped on a few (hundred) occasions. And no, I don't go back and split commits.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    And no, I don't go back and split commits. After all, that will make it all the more fun the next time you are under a deadline, and you are wondering why that commit broke something. You have the added benefit of having to imagine what you were thinking a few months ago, in addition to debugging. Fun! In other news, writing tests is a waste of time when you are under a deadline. It mostly works in the browser!
    - lzell 17y ago
      Ease up on the sarcasm. I get it, you write perfectly descriptive commit messages and your apps are perfectly tested. I was cutting the original committer some slack because he was guilty of something that most of us are guilty of.
  - pilif 17y ago
    was I still using SVN, I would totally agree with you here, but git was designed to help with issues as the ones that are in the patch: Git diff is awfully useful in displaying things like inconsistent newlines, inconsistent whitespace and it helps you keeping whitespace and code changes separate. And then there's "git add -i" which makes it very easy to go through a file change by change and commit parts of the changes. This feels dangerous, but to keep whitespace changes separate from functional changes, it's very powerful and not dangerous at all. Fixing a commit like this takes maybe 20 seconds more than just committing it and considering the amount of time you save when you try to fix the bug in that commit (of course there is one), it's totally worth the hassle. Note that this relies on git features. If you don't have git, I totally agree with your point. But my comment was about a commit made with git. To make a point: Have a look at the last change in the commit. How are these <th> tags related to the HTML5 conversion? Now when they go back to the changes in a few weeks, wouldn't they be glad to see these changes in its own commit with its own message?
- FooBarWidget 17y ago
  It looks more like his text editor was configured to auto-remove unused whitespaces.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I do this too, although it's not a bad idea (from a history-preserving standpoint) to filter-branch and kill that off from time to time. (Cue the "omg, it can break stuff!" comments in 3... 2... 1...)
look_lookatme 17y ago
Rails 3 is supposedly going to add helpers for adding HTML5 data attributes ( http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes ) at some point, too.
prodigal_erik 17y ago
Apparently this isn't a typo, HTML 5 really has no DTD. Hasn't the industry already wasted enough developer-years trying to parse tag soup? Are we really going to make this disastrous blunder again?
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  DTD != DOCTYPE. More clearly, you are conflating two things: a Document Type Definition, which HTML5 does not have (since it is not an SGML application) and a Document Type Declaration, which HTML5 does have. The former is (glossing over a lot here) an SGML document outlining the grammar and vocabulary of a particular markup language. The latter is a statement that a document uses a particular markup language. And such a statement does not require or imply the existence of a corresponding formal SGML definition of the language.
  - prodigal_erik 17y ago
    Right, they removed the public and system identifiers from the declaration because there will be no SGML DTD to point at. But as far as I can tell, the current draft fails to provide an official schema of any kind to take the place of a DTD.
    - ubernostrum 17y ago
      That's because the specification instead defines the manner in which HTML5 documents should be parsed. In theory someone can provide an XML schema which defines the rules for the XML serialization of HTML5, but parsing HTML5 as HTML isn't something which (so far as I know) can be expressed in a standard machine-readable schema format. The downside is you don't have "drop this file into an SGML parser and it works". But since that never worked with real-world SGML-based HTML anyway, the upside is that you get a parsing mechanism which actually handles the sorts of things you'll encounter in the wild.
- rimantas 17y ago
  What blunder are you talking about? HTML4.01 has DTD, XHTML1.0 has DTD, did it help in any way? Tag soup is already there and will stay for a long time. From all the specs so far HTML5 has the best description how to deal with it.

51 points by laktek 17y ago

Ok what's the downside to using the new doctag? What about old IE6 users? I have a new site going online tomorrow and would be willing to go HTML5 as long as it won't kill older browsers.

ned 17y ago
You mean a doctype. IE6 users won't be affected if you declare the HTML5 elements in JS, as described here: http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-firefox-2/ http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi...

laktek 17y ago

Also, tag helpers for audio and video HTML5 tags have been pushed to edge rails - http://bit.ly/PGV5B http://bit.ly/PGV5B So doctype change must've been made mainly to support these tags.

pilif 17y ago

this is not at all related to the essence of the commit, but as the rails guys are using git which brings us the beauty that is rebase -i, why is this commit so incredibly bad? It mixes functional changes and whitespace changes. It even contains functional changes not related to the commit message. I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one. I know. Just nitpicking, but having the possibility of creating "clean" commits in a reasonable amount of time is one of the nice features of git. Why not use them?

lzell 17y ago
"I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one." Never? Are your deadlines infinitely flexible? I try my best to adhere to single purpose commits too, but being under the gun I know I've slipped on a few (hundred) occasions. And no, I don't go back and split commits.
- jrockway 17y ago
  And no, I don't go back and split commits. After all, that will make it all the more fun the next time you are under a deadline, and you are wondering why that commit broke something. You have the added benefit of having to imagine what you were thinking a few months ago, in addition to debugging. Fun! In other news, writing tests is a waste of time when you are under a deadline. It mostly works in the browser!
  - lzell 17y ago
    Ease up on the sarcasm. I get it, you write perfectly descriptive commit messages and your apps are perfectly tested. I was cutting the original committer some slack because he was guilty of something that most of us are guilty of.
- pilif 17y ago
  was I still using SVN, I would totally agree with you here, but git was designed to help with issues as the ones that are in the patch: Git diff is awfully useful in displaying things like inconsistent newlines, inconsistent whitespace and it helps you keeping whitespace and code changes separate. And then there's "git add -i" which makes it very easy to go through a file change by change and commit parts of the changes. This feels dangerous, but to keep whitespace changes separate from functional changes, it's very powerful and not dangerous at all. Fixing a commit like this takes maybe 20 seconds more than just committing it and considering the amount of time you save when you try to fix the bug in that commit (of course there is one), it's totally worth the hassle. Note that this relies on git features. If you don't have git, I totally agree with your point. But my comment was about a commit made with git. To make a point: Have a look at the last change in the commit. How are these <th> tags related to the HTML5 conversion? Now when they go back to the changes in a few weeks, wouldn't they be glad to see these changes in its own commit with its own message?
FooBarWidget 17y ago
It looks more like his text editor was configured to auto-remove unused whitespaces.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I do this too, although it's not a bad idea (from a history-preserving standpoint) to filter-branch and kill that off from time to time. (Cue the "omg, it can break stuff!" comments in 3... 2... 1...)

look_lookatme 17y ago

Rails 3 is supposedly going to add helpers for adding HTML5 data attributes ( http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes ) at some point, too.

prodigal_erik 17y ago

Apparently this isn't a typo, HTML 5 really has no DTD. Hasn't the industry already wasted enough developer-years trying to parse tag soup? Are we really going to make this disastrous blunder again?

ubernostrum 17y ago
DTD != DOCTYPE. More clearly, you are conflating two things: a Document Type Definition, which HTML5 does not have (since it is not an SGML application) and a Document Type Declaration, which HTML5 does have. The former is (glossing over a lot here) an SGML document outlining the grammar and vocabulary of a particular markup language. The latter is a statement that a document uses a particular markup language. And such a statement does not require or imply the existence of a corresponding formal SGML definition of the language.
- prodigal_erik 17y ago
  Right, they removed the public and system identifiers from the declaration because there will be no SGML DTD to point at. But as far as I can tell, the current draft fails to provide an official schema of any kind to take the place of a DTD.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    That's because the specification instead defines the manner in which HTML5 documents should be parsed. In theory someone can provide an XML schema which defines the rules for the XML serialization of HTML5, but parsing HTML5 as HTML isn't something which (so far as I know) can be expressed in a standard machine-readable schema format. The downside is you don't have "drop this file into an SGML parser and it works". But since that never worked with real-world SGML-based HTML anyway, the upside is that you get a parsing mechanism which actually handles the sorts of things you'll encounter in the wild.
rimantas 17y ago
What blunder are you talking about? HTML4.01 has DTD, XHTML1.0 has DTD, did it help in any way? Tag soup is already there and will stay for a long time. From all the specs so far HTML5 has the best description how to deal with it.