HTML 5

Shovel · Aug 8, 2005

Figure I may as well throw this in the direction of you lot…

You may or may not be aware of a rather new 'industry and enthusiasts' group called the WHAT Working Group. While the W3C are working hard on 'next generation' standards like XHTML2 and XForms (which are not backwards compatible), the WHATWG is trying to evolve the existing HTML4 standard to make it better specified and more useful to publishing.

We're years away from XHTML2 being usable (IE support, Windows Vista adoption, etc.) and WHATWGs two specs "Web Forms 2" and "Web Applications 1.0" combine together to form something called 'HTML 5'.

Words don't quite describe how super-cool it is. The most important things that they've done are:

Add specification detail to previous underspecified sections of HTML (definition lists, phrase elements)
Respecify some deprecated elements with new, semantic purposes (<small> for 'smallprint' and <i> for 'instance', for example)

HTML5 also gives dedicated elements for headers, footers, navigation, sections and asides. Div-itis be damned!

It also has a doctype as simple as '<!DOCTYPE html>'.

So, is anyone interested?

Jonty · Aug 8, 2005

Hey Shovel

It seems you can't win with standards these days. If people take the 'extensiblity' offered and do their own thing people complain about bifurcation and refuse to support it. If people leave things alone then they complain when they can't achieve x,y,z.

What you've linked to above looks very cool, but I doubt it'll be supported, which is a shame. Even MicroFormats which are very fashionable at the moment (and extremely easy to implement) have extremely little practical implementation, although I guess they are new. I'm not too keen on all their suggestions but I guess that's just preference. Sadly a lot of good work goes on like this (e.g. the Dublin Core Metadata Intiative) and yet gets little attention. Shame

Kind Regards

Shovel · Aug 8, 2005

Well, Web Apps and Web Forms 2 are fully backed by Apple, Mozilla and Opera. The specs are heavily influenced by a bloke named Ian Hickson, who works for Opera and is also a member of the CSS working group.

I am under the impression that using the new elements should 'just work', although a crude test just now suggests otherwise. We'll see.

Microformats are insanely new, so don't expect to see anything but experimental implementations. The hCard->vCard converter and hCalendar->iCalendar converter are both targets for integration into Firefox extensions for starters (get a status bar icon for adding a vCard to your local address book), get an 'add to calendar' link generated by the browser in web pages.

At the very least, it gives us more power to be mark-up wankers and (assuming I'm correct on the 'it can work in old browsers' bit) it will also destroy the icky 'div within div within div within div' habits that are happening with too little thought

SheepCow · Aug 16, 2005

Dublin Core is quite large in the world of the Semantic Web. I work for the AKT project (I'm a student working for them over the summer) and we use it in a chunk of the projects we've got.

Infact you will soon (I think) be able to get most of the Electronics and Computer Science school's data in RDF (also in a few different ontologies).

HTML 5

Shovel

Can't get enough of FH

Jonty

Fledgling Freddie

Shovel

Can't get enough of FH

SheepCow

Bringer of Code

Users who are viewing this thread