Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
HTML 5 Public Working Draft Released
While the community argued over X-UA-Compatible or X-IE-VERSION-FREEZE, depending on which side of the fence you sit, the W3C published two new and important documents:
Moments ago the joint effort of the W3C HTML WG and WHATWG resulted in publication of two documents in the W3C Technical Report space: HTML 5 and HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. I think I can safely say that the WHATWG community is very happy with the W3C publishing HTML 5 as a First Public Working Draft. Many thanks to all involved!
It is great to see this actually getting out there. It is very fun indeed to look at the new elements and think about how you would use the likes of <dialog>, <command>, <meter>, and finally being able to do things like input type=”datetime|datetime-local|date|month|week|time|number|range|email|url”.
It feels like semantics are being added in. The generality of div class=”whatever” is all well and good, but for the very common situations, I am looking forward to using type=”email” and having the browser take care of validation, and using my address book to pick through.
apart from still being sceptic about html5, why does “using my address book to pick through” ring an alarm bell in my head?
I wonder what the advantages are to specifically declaring an element as an “aside” or an “article”… I do like the new input types and global attributes contenteditable, and finally an a tag without a href is a placeholder.
using my address book would be awesome, allowing any kind of script control of said address book would be bogus. I can’t imagine JS being able to access anything in the address book, that’s suicide.
‘I wonder what the advantages are to specifically declaring an element as an “aside†or an “article‒
To me, the biggest advantage is for parsing of multiple-article documents (for article) and for parsing any document with tangential content (for aside) where you might opt to leave it out/make its visibility optional or contextual in an application that aggregates data like that.
Because multiple articles on a document are more easily identified with article than with div.article.
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‘using my address book would be awesome, allowing any kind of script control of said address book would be bogus. I can’t imagine JS being able to access anything in the address book, that’s suicide.’
I’d imagine this would be best implemented at the OS-software level, not JS-accessible at all.
Incredible- the W3C is finally waking up to the fact that the web no longer a collection of hyperlinked word processing documents. They are finally starting to create elements like menu, video, and datagrid. Unfortunately, by the time HTML 5 is widely supported it will be 20 years past due. And likely obsolete.. again!
Why use instead of ? Because a spider or browser can read a standardized set of tags, interpret the page content, and do something useful with it.
Eesh my tags were eaten. I said why use <article> instead of <div class="article"> …
I like the more “purposeful” elements and heightened possibilities for expressing the proper semantic of a document…
But to me this is more like a draft for a future XHTML standard than something I’d consider using now.
@Bub For the same reason you use and not
@Bub, spiders and browsers can anyway, without those defined tags. http://microformats.org/
erm http://microformats.org/about/