When it comes to the software development, the average person is usually a bit befuddled; discussions about it tend to be quite esoteric, and setting up can involve a steep learning curve depending on the language and IDE. Most young North Americans have, however, had at least a little bit of experience with basic web development or design, be it via work opportunities like co-op, or merely due to the desire to make changes to a not-so-secret MySpace profile page.
HTML (hyper text mark-up language) is thus far the most commonly used language employed by the computer-aware population, and its last major revision occurred over ten years ago (doesn’t realising this make you feel old?). Now, after all this time, the W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS has finally brought some significant changes to the widely used tool.
Defining the fifth major revision of the language, work on HTML5 has been ongoing since 2004, and has been a joint effort between the W3C HTML WorkGroup and WHATWG(Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), with input being provided by all the major browser owners: Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Mozilla. Previews of the new version of HTML suggest that W3C has taken a lot from observing standard web design practices, making templates for more easily implemented in HTML5 that they would have previously with CSS or JavaScript. There has also been a large emphasis on the readability of source code. Doctype headers and meta tags for defining character encoding have shrunken drastically. A standard template with HTML4 that could have involved a series of floating divs, named conventionally as “header”, “footer”, “content”, “nav”, (and so on) can now be replaced by section-themed tags; the containers eliminate the need for cross-browser hacks, but also makes the source-code easier on the eyes and tabbing quicker for the end user.
Newly implemented multimedia tags have also indicated an awareness of the web’s general movement towards more interactive websites. Up till recently, embedded audio and video has suffered from some cross browser discrepancies with regards to loading and rendering, save for those files in Flash format. The <audio> and <video> elements now make a variety of file formats embeddable, and should have full cross-browser support upon HTML5’s official deployment. The <video> tag also supports “posters”, a png or jpg image of the developer’s choice used to represent the video when it is not playing. Both Opera and WebKit have recently released experimental builds with partial support for these multimedia tags so that the curious web-dev may muck around. More serious web-developers will also be pleased to know that HTML 5 has integrated a lot of commonly used JavaScript and Jscript features, such as offline data storage, cross-document messaging, and access to the back/forward stack. It should not be left unsaid that they have also finally created a native drag-and-drop attribute that can be used on any element (much fun shall emerge from this)! The full list of new elements can be seen at http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/ .
Some of the less obvious changes to HTML 5 revolve around how it is defined within browsers. Previous versions of HTML and XHTML have traditionally been defined in terms of their syntax. HTML5 is now being defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM)- a tree-like representational structure used by browsers to comprehend the document (it is traversed depth-first for easy element retrieval, for those who are curious).
Work on HTML5 continues to progress at phenomenal speeds , though the official “release” date has not been stated- it is theorized that the release will occur any time between the next sixteen months to several years. The timeframe has proven to be a disappointment to the keen few that follow its advancements. Fortunately, there are numerous channels through which ambitious coders may wish to contribute, and developers are encouraged to contact W3C’s HTML WG/WHATWG by subscribing to their mailing lists, wikis, forums, and rss feeds.
Links: http://www.w3.org/html/
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