I’m fascinated by the huge amount of discussion going on right now around HTML 5. Both John Allsop and Jeffrey Zeldman have written some interesting commentary in the last couple of days outlining what they believe is wrong with both the spec and the process involved in developing the spec. Most interesting to me is that a lot of the so called mess is a result from an open process. A lot of us who work with clients on a daily basis have had the experience of working with a client that makes design decisions by committee and the pain if it there isn’t a strong leader in place to guide the process. Sometimes even if you have a strong leader you can end producing a lower quality product or a partial solution.

The openness of the web has created an environment where anybody can make a website without having to go to university or accept a specific standard to follow. You can choose to follow a spec but you can also choose to make your website work only on specific browsers or to develop very very messy code that can still work. I think that this is good – it is an open medium to which anybody can potentially publish – and bad – it’s now impossible to start over developing a new one-standard-fits-all solution.

HTML 5 attempts to address the web as it is and I think that all of this discussion is great. Let’s get it out in the open and have thoughtful commentary from seasoned pros and from new developers. Let’s not forget though that there does need to be guidance and direction otherwise we will never see HTML 5 move beyond draft status.