Programming in the State of 70% Drunkeness

Lachlant Hunt wrote up a blog post that gives us a Preview of HTML5

In one of my earlier post Webkit Introduces: HTML5 Media Support, we reviewed the media support of the HTML5, but there are much much more. In this post, Lachlant Hunt highlighted some really useful features introduced in HTML5.

To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics.Work on HTML 5, which commenced in 2004, is currently being carried out in a joint effort between the W3C HTML WG and the WHATWG. Many key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft; and a range of other organisations and individuals with many diverse interests and expertise.

What really excites me is the new structural layout. Instead of having a crazy load of divs (which i know we are all guilty of doing so) to achieve a simple layout, we now have a structure like this:

See the difference? The tag itself now makes sense. Just like the “header” tag we had before.

Unlike previous versions of HTML and XHTML, which are defined in terms of their syntax, HTML 5 is being defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM)—the tree representation used internally by browsers to represent the document.
The advantage of defining HTML 5 in terms of the DOM is that the language itself can be defined independently of the syntax.

Did you catch the phrase “the language itself can be defined independently of the syntax”? Oh yeah! Just imagine a well formatted DOM Tree where objects are nested perfectly. Not to mention how much easier and more efficient it will be when it comes to DOM Manipulation through javascript.
Let’s all cross our fingers and hope HTML5 gets released as soon as it can.
Go check out the “How to Contribute” section of the original post. Your help will matter the speed of HTML5’s release.

Share This