blog.strakt

The working draft of the HTML 5 standard was released a few days ago. HTML 4, the current standard, hasn’t really been reworked in 10 years - a long time in the relatively short lifespan of the modern web.

Much has changed since the early dot-com days of December 1997 when HTML 4 was published, as developers, designers and users have unlocked the web’s potential. Web sites have moved from being a collection of static pages to media-rich communities leveraging participation.

HTML 5 is designed to reflect this, with APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling multimedia, managing client-side data storage and editing parts of documents. Turning to more bread-and-butter stuff, HTML 5 will also make it easier to represent familiar page elements. A full list of changes can be found here.

“Ajax and related innovations have propelled demands for a new standard that allows people to create web applications that interoperate across desktop and mobile,” the group said.

A drawing API? It will be interesting to see sites that use no graphics at all, just typography and browser-rendered graphics. Speedy. Though would this be regarded as presentational markup? - something we’ve been told to separate from our content? Either way, I don’t think we need to start making flashcards for the array of new tags just yet.

Read more here: Reg Developer