HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph

alexkessinger.net

78 pointsvoidfiles36 comments

Many of the sentences in this paragraph suffer from one of the following defects: poor grammar, redundancy, excessive jargon, excessive use of metaphor ("as a toy ... dodo's game ... chips on the table", "gearing up to bet big"), and spelling mistakes. This greatly reduces the credibility of the author. The use of comma to connect sentence fragments improperly is really painful: "Web developers are happy, but all the other platform hackers are sad, flash, silverlight, ...". The literal meaning of this sentence is that "other platform hackers" are, among other things, "flash".

The paragraph's construction makes it hard for the reader to know what the main point is. At the beginning of the paragraph, I was lead to believe that the topic of the paragraph was the lineage and evolution of HTML5 and its emergence from a previous failure. Halfway through, the topic shifts ("Implicitly,") to discuss the implications of the technology. In the third half, it seeks to get to a "bottom line," which seems to be "you should care about HTML5."

The lack of hyperlinks and references has several knock-on effects. The first is that claims made ("Some dismiss") smell like straw man arguments or like hyperbolic statements ("there will be no more versions of html"). Another effect is that the reader is left with no way to learn more, making this a pretty shocking example of the failure to use hypertext (ironically, to discuss hypertext markup technology).

Some recommendations: (1) Print out the paragraph, take a pen, and start crossing things out. Seek to reduce the number of words. (2) Read your work out loud, as you would read a book to a child. Not as you would talk to a buddy over a beer. (3) Review some books on clear writing.

This was really helpful. I'll I can say is that I am going to take this, and get better.

Some people might wonder if I actually tried to edit, I did; this isn't me being lazy. So, feedback like this is helpful. Well, not linking to source material that is lazy.

I went to college, 4 years, in a program that had a fair amount of writing. I never thought I was a good writer, but I never got a good take down like this. Even from my teachers, I wonder if they just saw it as a lost cause.

Anyways, thanks.

I forgot two more suggestions: One is to find a writing buddy. Edit (and by that, I mean critique, not rewrite) each other's work, and offer comments back and forth. Establish some ground rules so that you don't get angry at each other. I personally think this is best done in person. When I need to communicate something important at work, I'll almost always ask a trusted coworker to help me read and edit my writing. Without fail, they will see several things I missed.

I try to self-edit and, I can offer a suggestion from my own experience. I strongly suggest using a pen on a paper copy. This takes you out of the context in which you originally wrote the work-- your computer and keyboard. You can step away from your desk and go somewhere with a different context. A library, coffee shop, or outside under a tree are good places to rethink and rewrite.

And finally, I hope we'll see a revised version of your HTML5 paragraph-- you've clearly hit on an idea appealing to HN readers...

If you're truly serious about improving your writing, the indispensable guide is "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It even contains an example page out of his early draft of the book that is literally festooned with (his own) editing markup.

Alot of successful writing is in clear thinking (not being overly emotional at the moment helps immensely), then paring down of thoughts, _then_ writing, and then finally (and most importantly) editing. I always find saving a draft and sleeping on it before reading it back to yourself prior to sending/saving/publishing often helps.

the "dodo's game" bit actually make me wonder if he was playing some word game, like not using certain letters or making the numeric values of the letters in all the sentences have a certain sum or something. it struck me less as ordinary bad writing and more as just really weird, something that you'd only come up with under artificial restrictions.

You are the biggest douche asshole on HN and probably the biggest idiot as far not being able to understand someones post because they have poor grammar/writing skills. I could give this to my little sister and she would be able to understand it. Delete your account from here you asshole.

Omitting the paragraph breaks from writing doesn't turn it into one paragraph.

Edit: Okay, I probably should have just let it go.

Original: But who decides where the paragraph breaks go?

Edit:

okay well the above comentor obviously wins, but my point was that their is no compiler for english that can point out my syntax errors, and that we each develop a sense of english, and rules are fluid, and can be broken.

General rules for beginners is one topic or idea per paragraph.

But your "paragraph" is even harder to define as there isn't any real fluidity to it, it seems more like thoughts here and there in short sentences with little to zero continuation.

I don't want to turn you off from writing and you should just keep on going in order to improve (no matter what people say), however learning from authors and books can also help along the way.

Perhaps some might call me petty, but in my mind, credibility takes a serious hit when mistakes like "many more have there chips on the table" are made.

That being said, I think this is a good attempt to encapsulate HTML5 into a short statement (which should, as others have pointed out, really be broken up into multiple paragraphs). I'm not so sure it is a good encapsulation; but certainly a good attempt.

That is petty. Most of the great thinkers of the world have not known English even well enough to write that. It is illogical to question somebody's credibility merely on the basis of minor language mistakes.

(In the same spirit: The semicolon in your final sentence should be a comma. But it doesn't affect my judgment of you one way or the other. ;) )

you are saying that it should say "many more have their chips on the table". That was an honest mistake. I proofread, a lot . This has been sitting on my editor for 2 weeks, at least. I just miss things like that. Thanks for pointing it out.

Playing a dodo's game? Platform hackers are sad? HTML5 is going to be 'every where you want to be'? Why are a few lines written to the standard of a middle school book report on the front page?

Well, it's certainly not because I am in middle school, I wish I started writing like this in middle school I would be much better by now, no, it's because I am a bad writer.

Thank you though, this is going to go in my list of question to ask my self while editing; does this feel like it could be in a middle school book report?

You don't have to be a bad writer. Good writer, that's a different story - 'not terrible' is fairly straightforward.

1. Keep it simple 2. Avoid howlers

Give 'Politics and the English Language' another read and scan the style guide of your favourite major newspaper or periodical. Check spelling. Check basic style (look up 'run on sentence' in a style guide and see what it says about what you wrote in your comment). Check if you're making sense (ask yourself, what sort of games do dodos play? does text 'feel' or 'read' or 'sound'? etc). If you want a use a metaphor, simile, idiom or common expression, triple check, look it up, verify it means what you think it means and consider 1. again. And that's it - simple, makes sense and has no howlers takes you into the stratosphere of online writing. You can decide whether you're interested in getting to orbit from there.

Hey, everyone here should give you a break, it is easy to criticize, and English is clearly not your first language.

Well, I wish that were the case, or you are making a joke. I can't tell. Either way it's funny.

That has a lot to do with anything relevant in this discussion. Thank you for that! You've bettered this discussion by pointing these things out.

because not everyone is a faggot douche like you

Plus the bit about billion dollar companies.

Billion dollar companies are making HTML5 a second class citizen to their own app platforms.

Not true, RIM allows you to write entire applications using web technologies, and sell them in their app store. Same with the Palm Pre.

* Except RIM

How is Apple making HTML5 a second class citizen. The HTML5 app store came out 1 year before the native app store? All the HTML5 applications are free, and there are a lot more of them.

My reality of HTML5:

HTML5 can do nice things that hackers can currently post on their blogs in the hope that, if they are first and loud, eventually someone big will come calling and their developer dreams will come true. HTML5 is a nice thing to research for the mid-to-long term because in the real world the percentage of users that hit the site my job relies on that use IE6+7+8 is over 85% and that will not change any time soon. HTML5 demos do look pretty though so kudos on those but don't get carried away.

> Web developers are happy, but all the other platform hackers are sad, flash, silverlight, and Objective-C folk to name a few.

Why does HTML5 make "Objective-C folk" sad?

Obviously, Objective-C means Apple, and Apple's total control of their platforms might be thwarted by the kind of functionality enabled by HTML5. However, that does not seem to have anything to do with Objective-C per se.

Does it?

"After this version there will be no more versions of html"---that's a pretty bold statement..

It's not my statement it came from Mark Pilgrim. You can check it out here http://blog.whatwg.org/whats-next-in-html-episode-1

It would have been nice to have a link to that as part of the post itself; I thought that was a odd thing to say. But I'm definitely going to read that now.

My HTML5 Brief in one sentence:

HTML5 is a buzzword like AJAX and Web2.0 that encapsulates the most exciting improvements to the web platform in the past and next few years.

So HTML5 isn't a w3c spec?

Yes it is, but the spec covers only a subset of what people are referring to when they say "HTML5." The official spec [1] outlines what is actually part of HTML5. This includes a bunch of stuff, like <video>, <audio> and <canvas>, but not the new javascript apis like local storage, drag and drop, web workers and web sockets, nor CSS3, nor SVG, etc.

AJAX originally meant (as its name implies) the use of XMLHttpRequest to asynchronously load xml data from a server. However, it quickly became a buzz word that meant increased interactively on a web page outside of the page reload. HTML5 has similarly evolved from describing a limited set of new standards to describe a new way of building highly interactive, desktop-like web applications and encompasses a whole host of W3C standards, recommendations and working drafts.

For some evidence that this expanded definition has become the norm, take a look at the HTML5 Test [2], which has been linked here several times. While not anything official, only a handful of the features tested are actually part of the HTML 5 spec.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html5-20100624/ [2] http://html5test.com/

This discussion was, in fact, making the rounds of the standardistas a week or two ago (following the release of html5test). Not only did everybody agree with your assessment, but most of them thought it was good (only a few people such as Tantek are trying to make HTML5 refer only to the W3C HTML5 spec... they'll fail).

As Chris Wilson insightfully put it:

> HTML5 is now a brand, more than it is a specification. There are a variety of reasons for that, and a variety of persons “responsible” for that confusion, but the ship has sailed.