Microsoft Promotes HTML 5 Logo for Websites

Will YOU use it? They are pumped up that their new IE 9 browser will support HTML 5, I guess! Good for them! They haven’t exactly been supporters of web standards before this! Oh well…

Microsoft’s pitch for HTML5 logo has familiar ring

“I’m not doing cartwheels over the new HTML5 logo, which reminds me of a superhero badge. It’s bold, masculine and sort of orange, which will appeal how to the majority of web users? But the logo is a great idea, and it’s big splash promotion — some of that from Microsoft — is exactly what the standard-in-progress needs right now.

Today in a blog post, Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s general manager of interoperability, writes: ‘The logo links back to W3C, the place for authoritative information on HTML5, including specs and test cases. It’s time to tell the world that HTML5 is ready to be adopted.’

There’s a strange appropriateness to Microsoft promoting the logo’s use. It’s what the company did in the late 1990s to promote Internet Explorer. During the so-called browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape, each side adopted proprietary tags not necessarily supported in the other’s browser. Microsoft encouraged websites supporting Internet Explorer to put up an IE logo/badge — to be proud, to proclaim their support. As a marketing mechanism, the logo branding was brilliant and quite uncommon.

I remember interviewing Sun cofounder and then chief executive Scott McNealy in his office about Java; some time in 1997. McNealy, an avid amateur hockey player, limped from an injury on the ice from the night before. I scolded McNealy, calling him a boy who cried wolf, for making promise after promise after promise about Java — like powering light switches — that never came to be. He didn’t get upset at that but my accusations about Java branding. I observed that Internet Explorer logos were on tens of thousands of websites, while Java was seemingly nowhere. If developers are using Java, why are they keeping a secret, I accused. McNealy responded by pointing across the room at his Java terminal and the tiny logo on the side. He blamed his marketers for not listening.”

So… what do you think?