W3C, the have published a proposal for the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: HTML. The new version comes with new elements and improved interoperability. We are especially interested in the new ‘irrelevant‘ attribute which we are sure will be widely accepted and implemented. It might even save Facebook and MySpace.
Also interesting are the ‘canvas‘ element which will represent a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly and a whole bunch of new Link Types. Besides the now widely used “nofollow” there are a whole bunch of new Link Types such as: “alternate”, “contact”, “external”, “pingback”, “prefetch”, “sidebar” and “tag”.
It will take some time before you will be able to take advantage of these new tags though so no need to update your websites just yet. Microsoft, still the biggest player in browsers, hasn’t complied with previous W3C standards yet and most browsers don’t even support CSS3 at this point so it will take a few years before you can start using the “canvas” and “prefetch” tags. Unless you only use Safari and Firefox! The ‘”Canvas” tag was first implemented in Safari by Richard Williamson and has now been adopted in the official HTML5 specs and works in Firefox too.
The current draft is now open for suggestions for improvement. And the W3C is not shy about using Web2.0 technology and services to keep you involved in the process. You can follow (non-editorial changes only) the whole editing process via http://twitter.com/WHATWG or follow live updates to the document here: http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker.
Oh, and can someone explain this obvious sneer at the end of the document (yes, we read all the way down) which we don’t quite understand:
“Special thanks and $10,000 to David Hyatt who came up with a broken implementation of the adoption agency algorithm that the editor had to reverse engineer and fix before using it in the parsing section.”
We will read the whole 318 pages (once we have printed them) tonight and give you more details soon, maybe, whenever. Can’t wait? Knock yourself out:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
Really awesome! Looking forward when you read all the 318 pages so you will update me ;)
Don’t get your point about irrelevant being a life-saver for MySpace/Facebook. Could you elaborate?
Hi Tim; I was trying to be funny and it always sucks to explain your own jokes. But here I go: since most information on social network is pretty ‘irrelevant’ I could see a lot of use for that particular tag. Get it? Laughing? No? Damn…
@Boris:
Hehe, ok get it. I’ll take you less seriously next time ;).
David Hyatt implemented the HTML parsing algorithm in Safari which the HTML 5 algorithm is based on. That algorithm contained various issues though, such as a crasher bug, and it was not documented.
Nice post Boris! Would you like to give a talk on HTML5 at Kings of Code?