You can call me an hypocrite if I say that a benevolent dictator can’t ever be a good solution for anything, because I think just the opposite too many times in my life. The best example is when I think about our missed Steve Jobs. Without his benevolent dictatorship Apple would have ended being just another junk computing company. Perhaps it wouldn’t exist anymore nowadays.

However, I never was enthusiastic, not at all, about the idea of an only person being the responsible of something so crucial as the future web standard language: xhtml 2 HTML5. Specially when, from the first moment, he looked down on some important achievements that xhtml had thankfully brought to us in the last decade.

My impression was always that he was a techie guy disdaining the importance of semantics (who cares!) in favour of some other cool techie things like client side data storage and so. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t criticize some great features of the new html. It’s just that I fint too arrogant the way he had done all the thing.

Now, it seems that the fact of the <time> element being dropped has opened the eyes of many people that, untill now, just clapped every Hickson movement or were too indulgent with the dictatorship situation because of the advantages the new standard would brought to us.

But this is not about <time> or any other controversial element dropped or added (<data>? OMFG!). It’s about the whole semantic and syntactic thing. Was too difficult to start the new language from the basis of our beloved xhtml? Was necesary to try to humiliate the standardistas (as they tagged us) with the return of the zombies presentational tags, like <b> or <u>? Was that arrogance necessary?

Now, that we had given him all the power, what? Shall we go back crying to mom W3C?

Some interesting posts about the matter:

• HTML5 dumps time element – Zeldman.
• Goodbye HTML5 <time>, hello <data>! – Bruce Lawson.
• Timeless – Jeremy Keith.
• HTML5 kills time, resurrects u – Adrian Roselli.

Bonus:

• Why no time?

Hot on twitter: #occupyhtml5