Does Flare support new HTML 5 styles

[nsemple]

Does Madcap Flare Version 6.1 support the new HTML 5 styles, such as header, article, aside, nav, hgroup...?
Browsers are now supporting them.

[Andrew]

Depends on what you mean by "supporting them." You can enter them into the code of your topics using a text editor, and I'd imagine they will be passed through to the WebHelp output, but I'm not sure if they work properly (structurally speaking), and I'm not sure they would work for PDF. I doubt that the XML Editor renders them correctly. I'd imagine the MadCap line is that HTML 5 isn't officially supported, but you'd have to ask them to be sure.

I haven't really tested any HTML 5 elements, nor am I familiar enough with HTML 5 to do so.

[RamonS]

I think anything like an official support will only come when HTML5 is an official standard. Right now HTML5 is more like a pudding where a bunch of people still push some sweet berries into. As Andrew suggested, try it and see what happens.

[nsemple]

Thanks. You're correct. Unfortunately, they don't render correctly in the XML editor.

I tried opening an html file that I had authored in Notepad in a Flare 6.1 project. Flare opened the file without issue, but none of the HTML 5 styles appeared correctly in the editor or the generated output. The structure/format/layout seems to all be ignored.

The html 5 styles worked great when I open the same html file directly from browsers (such as IE just as people have said they would for the past few months, but I guess Flare doesn't yet know how to interpret them.

[RamonS]

Worthwhile to add this to MadCap's To Do list here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[nsemple]

I submitted an enhancement request.

Hopefully, we'll see see support for HTML 5 styles in the next version of Flare.

Thanks again for your help.

[Andrew]

I submitted an enhancement request.

Hopefully, we'll see see support for HTML 5 styles in the next version of Flare.

Thanks again for your help.

I'd be surprised to see Flare support for HTML 5 before the standard gets to the next W3C stage (I believe that's the "Candidate Recommendation" stage; it's currently in Working Draft, and expected to be CR in the 2012 timeframe), but hey, I've been wrong before. Though It's very possible that Flare will support selected bits of HTML 5 (whatever the most "stable" bits are) earlier than the CR stage.

[nsemple]

Been many years and many versions of Flare since I first posted to this forum regarding this issue. I am now using Flare version 11, which you can use for html5 output.

I now see support for the use of div tags in the XML editor (showing blocks on the left side to indicate divs). However, unless I am missing something, I do not see that the interface allows you to easily use and define html5 tags such as article, section, nav, aside, hgroup.

Does anyone know what Madcap's rationale is for ignoring the html5 tags article, section, nav, aside, hgroup in their interface?

Do they want you to use div tags for everything for some reason?

[NorthEast]

Firstly, I'd suggest you put in a feature request.

I'm not sure why it's like this, but perhaps it's a constraint of having multiple possible targets; i.e. you can do almost anything in a browser-based output, but then how would you handle that in print outputs?

I agree it's a bit frustrating though. For example, if you look at an HTML5 output using Flare's new top navigation skin, it makes use of things like section and nav tags, and uses multiple classes on tags (which is also a very common in the majority of web frameworks and plugins). So it's a bit of a pain that the interface doesn't support this, and forces you to hand-code the HTML.