I was reading a good article earlier about the up and coming HTML 5. Well, I say up and coming, it'll probably be like the up and coming CSS 3 - won't be able to use it for another 5 years because Microsoft won't have updated their browsers to support it. Come on Microsoft! Nonetheless, HTML 5 looks to bring a lot of new features to the table that increasingly mimics XML - hence XHTML.

You may read the specification here, but as it's one of the longest, and possibly most tedious pages on the Internet, I somehow doubt you'll want to read it all.

The upshot of it all is they're introducing some pretty nifty features to HTML 5. I read somewhere they're actually discarding H1, H2, H3, etcetera... and just using a single <h> node which can then accept an attribute to set its header level. That wasn't mentioned in this article though.

Going with the XML ways, their tags are now a lot more descriptive. Instead of the ambiguous (one for Karl) <div> nodes, they're going for the more description approach. Namely:

• <header>
• <nav>
• <article>
• <section>
• <aside>
• <footer>

This allows you to actually describe exactly what the section is, whether it's a navigational block or a simple footer. This will make it much easier for us programmers to harvest the data from websites, as well. We'll know exactly where the headers start and end. One question I do have is the following: are copyright laws going to be re-worked in this new era of interoperability?

They also seem to have really extended onto the media side of things, too. In HTML 4.01 you could just simply embed music or videos using ActiveX - until Flash came along. Let's hope that the new HTML 5 media nodes utilise Flash otherwise I feel that will be the end of Flash as we know it - especially with their release of ActionScript 3, way to over-complicate matters, Adobe!


Above is a simple example on how you would embed a film into your website. You specify the poster image as well which allows browsers to bring up further information about the film before you go ahead and watch it. I assume this information will also allow them to tie it in with services such as iTunes.

All browsers, it seems, are going to have a native UI which can be switched on and off. There will also be the option of adding buttons, in pure HTML, to your website to control the media blocks. You can even specify which codecs the video and/or music requires, which will be a life saver as I find WMP often doesn't know what codec I'm supposed to have to watch a particular video. Up until now I've relied on VLC supporting every single one of them.

This is how you will be able to add a play button:


It seems HTML 5 is really bringing about a lot of change to the all-too-familiar, and out-dated, HTML 4.01! Exciting times are these! If you wish to read the article then please lose yourself over here.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

Exciting to say the least.

Hey guys, I'm new here, looks like a good place to learn (more) about php. Alistapart has some great articles and I saw that one yesterday as well.

In the comments I also found it might take another 10-15 years before it's usable.. I'ts strange and unfortunate that it takes so long to make those changes, especially in web terms it's ages..

The ideas are great, now they just need to be executed, within a reasonable time...

Welcome Jelmer! 10 to 15 years is a little longer than I had hoped. Maybe 5 years at the most would have been reasonable, I'd have thought.

Surely if the browsers are released to support both HTML 4.01 and HTML 5 then there will no problems, but I heard that with the new release of HTML, they're dropped all support for previous versions of HTML and so any websites that do not update will be not be rendered correctly at all. And we're talking about a hell of a lot of websites! The majority of which are still stuck in the caveman years with their table layouts.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

Well, the problem there is that we will still have to cope for the people with the old version browsers that don't support HTML5....

Guess IE users should be able to use those features 36806 years after they're released.

Exactly WinSrev, so even if they do alter their browsers, for as long as some leper is still using Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox 2.0.011, we'll have to use HTML 4.01. It really is set-up in a really silly way! Should be some kind of centralised location to get the standards from, that way when HTML 6 comes out, we won't be waiting around another 36,806 years.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

WH: Glad we agree on how long it'll take to get cross-browser support.

I think we all do... too long! I'll have retired by the time HTML 5 becomes the standard - well, that's now my new goal! Incidentally, Microsoft have just announced Internet Explorer 8, well, I say announced, they've announced its name, I bet that took hours of board-room discussions.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

While it sounds really good, and it'll be fun to try out... when beginning a new project, you have MORE thinking to do on how your gonna make it X-browser compatible... it can be a real hassle for us developers.

Peter Griffin says:
Also is XHTML 2.0 still in the works? Not sure why they'd have XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5... why not just combine it?

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Not quite a n00b...

I believe XHTML 2.0 is still definitely in the works. I don't know why they're not combining it, unless they have plans to take them in 2 different directions. Trouble is there is really no way to force people to use another browser, when even Windows XP comes bundled with Internet Explorer version 6, many people will never upgrade their browser unless explicitly told to do so. Unfortunately, those are the people who never go onto Windows updates and so they will never be aware that there is an updated version to the browser.

It will be a hassle, granted, but isn't it more of a hassle now having to write valid XHTML transitional/strict and then still finding out that it doesn't work well in other browsers?

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

But in the world of web development, the programmers hassle means nothing and the users means everything.

Quote for the win!

Lol! Yes, that is a good one, but come on, it's about things started to change. For example, the issue with the browsers incompatibilities should be the first issue that needs to be sorted out. HTML, XHTML and JS versions should be able to be rolled out and become the standard in weeks, not years. For that to happen there needs to be some kind of centralised area where every browser which wants to get a W3C certificate, MUST check for updates from W3C.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

OR every browser will continue in their own direction further away from the standards, the problem here is that for example, firefox allows images on <tr> tags where as many other browsers don't. If firefox did this in HTML5 then this means that it is still staggering away from offical standards.

I can see where it can be helpful for web designers, however it also depicts expandability / interoperability (more advanced designs, ...), in my opinion..

It would be suicide if they did that, WinSrev. I can't think of any more silly way to go about things than to let each and every browser decide on the standards. Although we can centralise the standards - to which W3C appear to have taken the reigns, there is bound to be inconsistencies across the browsers - that's inevitable.

If we're going to move towards interoperability and expandability as Jay mentioned, then it's imperative that all browsers began to behave the same which resultantly means that we need the rules centralised as well. That way if there is an update to say the HTML 5, then W3C could ping each and every browser entity, and then they update their browser software automatically from their servers, and then the updates come through as mandatory. Sort of like:

W3C Update Mozilla Firefox Update Clients Update

It's clear from the past 10 years or so that something needs to be changed. You've got the same when you look into networking - IP addresses and running out so they introduce IPv6, but it's going to be years and years before we witness IPv6 become the standard. Whereas on the IP address side of matters, it's rather difficult to centralise the rules, but for the HTML/XHTML/CSS and JS stuff - dead easy if only it was planned out. Don't make me fetch my pen and paper!

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.