W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5

Lachlan Hunt writes "Today W3C announced that the HTML Working Group has published the first public working draft of HTML 5 — A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. It's been over 9 months since the working group began in March 2007 and this long awaited milestone has finally been achieved. '"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web..." Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively.' An updated draft of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 has also been published to help guide you through the changes."

Comments

What a Snoozer!

[moore.dustin]

What a lame duck HTML5 will be. These changes serve to only annoy current developers, little more. The only benefit here is for people looking to learn HTML from the source code. It will make a little more sense at a glance, but forgive me for not finding that worthwhile. Who learns HTML via notepad and source code anymore? All the rooks are going to keep using dreamweaver and thinking they understand what is actually happening. They don't.

The only thing that might save me grief is going to be the small changes to form elements. Making something required is only half the battle though. If you are checking the data, you've gotta see if it empty anyways, so I guess this is good for the 'Name' and 'Company' fields :(