-- Molly Holzschlag
The history: WHAT-WG is a company that broke away from the W3C because they did not believe in the future of XHTML. Now, of course, XHTML is dying off and is no longer supported. However, what comes out of that group is not considered an "open standard." The only official open web standards are issued by the W3C.
Today, W3C says they are committing future resources to HTML5 and are no longer supporting XHTML.
Google, Microsoft (!!!), Mozilla, Opera, and WebKit all, for the first time ever, believe in HTML5 and want to see it succeed. This may be the first time in the web's history that this ubiquitous acceptance happened.
Lots of companies are already jumping on board -- Netflix, MySpace, YouTube.
HTML5 is an attempt to advance the web's core language and to embrace a rich, interactive, forward-thinking web. It is also being designed to support full backward-compatibility. HTML5 will replace XHTML 1.0, DOM2HTML and, of course, all previous versions of HTML.
One of the core design principles for HTML5 is explicit specification for error handling and more graceful degradation (for example, if you deploy to an older browser that does not support HTML5, the application should fail gracefully).
The W3C's objective is to evolve HTML rather than recreate it. They are trying to avoid reinvention. They are also trying to build on real-world use and test cases.
HTML5 Syntax:
There is no documentation type definition (DTD). So there is no special declaration for version 5.
HTML syntax is still served using text/html. However, you can use HTML5 with XML syntax and XHTML 1.0.
Of course, when we implement in XML notation we must close our tags the proper way (of course, we should always be rigorous and write well-formed HTML as well as XML).
The W3C will soon support SVG universally (they're waiting on -- shocker -- IE to build support into IE9).
There are all new elements that Molly runs through with us. You should read her slides to get the full list of new elements and definitions. She said she will soon post them on the Philly ETE site.
'Input' is a particularly interesting new element. It allows us to to declare and execute embedded scripts in a more terse, expressive manner without all the clunkiness of the way we declare them now.
'Require' is another great new element. It allows us validate form input without any using any scripts! That's pretty darn cool.
Embedded media is also coming. Such as canvas (the HTML5 drawing API), video, and audio (embedded audio and video without the reliance on plug-ins). These are works in progress. Even further down the road (but still realistic future features) are localStorage (client-side data storage that is persistent across sessions and uses client-side SQL storage) and applicationStorage (enabling offline applications).
One of the best places, believe it or not, to find information about web standards and HTML5 is Wikipedia. So feel free to check it out there or, of course from the horse's mouth at www.w3.org
No comments:
Post a Comment