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The Story Behind HTML 5

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By Lauren Fritsky

HTML 5, intended to replace what was previously HTML4, XHTML1 and DOM2 HTML, has made the news throughout this summer. But the buzz doesn’t mean the spec is anywhere near ready for implementation. Here’s where the latest version of the language of the Web currently stands.

How It’s Different
The two groups working on the revision are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international group that develops Web standards, and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). Ian Hickson of Google is the spec editor.

The list of changes to HTML 5 since W3C began working on it is exhaustive, and the spec will certainly continue to evolve in the coming year, says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the group. “Some features were dropped, such as the datagrid or bb elements recently,” he says. “Some features were added, like the microdata section. Some features were separated from HTML 5, such as Web sockets. There are still requests for new features pending, like more support for video captioning. Microsoft has been submitted some substantial comments lately and more are on the way.”

Other factors that make HTML 5 unique:

New syntax: The syntax is no longer based on SGML, and is designed to be backwards compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. Old browsers will be able to disregard constructs of the new spec in the event of incorrect syntax.

New APIs: According to the W3C Working Draft, there are several new APIs for use with various elements and attributes, including: two-dimensional drawing to be used with the new canvas element; offline Web applications; Web application self registry for certain protocols or media types; drag and drop for use with the draggable attribute; cross-document messaging and the exposition of the history to allow pages to add to it to prevent breaking the back button.

New elements: They include canvas, section, article, aside, hgroup, nav, datalist and embed.

New attributes: Elements already part of HTML 4 got a makeover, such as: a scoped attribute for the style element to enable scoped style sheets; a ping attribute for the a and area elements that denotes a space-separated list of URLs that must be pinged when the hyperlink is followed; an async attribute for the script element that affects script loading and execution and seamless and sandbox attributes for the iframe element to allow for sandboxing content such as blog comments. Several attributes from HTML 4 now apply to all elements, such as dir, id, lang, style, tabindex and title.

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