Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5

Posted by Zonk on from the new-coat-of-shellack dept.

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."

1 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not again by hixie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of HTML5 was actually done outside of the W3C.

    However, to address your earlier point, one of the big things we're doing with HTML5 is we're going and specifying the bits that all the other specs avoided, like 'window', like 'setTimeout', like how to parse HTML in the face of errors, and so on, and saying exactly how they should work, based on how browsers do them now, so that we can get the browsers to converge on one interoperable set of behaviours.

    I'm also working on the Acid tests, e.g. Acid2 and Acid3, to foster interoperability on the older specs. It's working pretty well so far.

    http://ln.hixie.ch/
    http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3

    So... HTML5 should actually help bring the browsers closer on the bits that weren't specified before, and the Acid tests are directly intended to do that with the bits that _were_ specified before. If you want to help out, please do -- see the links above for how to help with Acid3, and the links below for how to help with HTML5:

    http://blog.whatwg.org/w3c-restarts-html-effort