The HTML v.5 draft was released on the 22nd and I’ve had a little bit of time to read some of the 488 pages, and there are some interesting things.
For one, there are hugely obvious sections where RSS, Video and Sound have influenced the new standard - allowing for embedding RSS directly into the HTML (ie: no widget needed) as well as new embed code for Video and Audio.
Blog influence comes in with Article and Dialog tags becoming standard inside HTML, although there are a few more than can be used as well that completely fit within the Blogging world.
So, before I get into the nitty gritty, some may wonder why the change has occurred. With the advent of so many fully-function, Web 2.0 websites, it seems that many developers, myself included, have used their own tags to show things that have become the norm. For instance, WordPress uses the “POST” class to show a post - imagine that. Even SharePoint uses “TOP” as the same indicator of content. There are several other web applications that use roughly the same DIVs for the same type of content - HTML v.5 is an attempt to standardize that.
Another change that will cause a little grief is the conformity section. HTML Writers (ie: Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, etc) need conform to higher standards. This means better selection of tags, more data for the tags, etc. But, in the long run, due to how WYSIWYG editors are, there is a paragraph inside the draft specifically for them:
WYSIWYG editors must include a meta element in the head element whose name attribute has the value generator and whose content attribute’s value ends with the string “(WYSIWYG editor)”. Non-WYSIWYG authoring tools must not include this string in their generator string.
Directly underneath, however, there is a note in red stating that the requirement may be dropped. For those that are curious how the tag from the above would look:
For Audio and Video, there are custom tags as well. You’ll see src, poster, autoplay, start, loopstart, loopend, end, playcount, controls, width, height for Video and almost the same for Audio.
It’s going to be interesting how the Web 2.0 community starts using this new model to bring about more interaction with users. It should also make development easier for Content Management Systems (CMS) and Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM) that change to the new HTML v.5 specifications - no more learning all the custom tags that each product has.
Now, if all that got you excited, there is also a Web Forms 2 standard in the works…
