W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:23AM 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."

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Re:Still sloppy by hixie · 2008-01-22 08:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

Actually originally we wanted to remove the DOCTYPE altogether, and since the start tag is optional that would have made the boilerplate "" (the empty string), or "" if you want to include the start tag. Unfortunately, in non-HTML5 browsers, if there's no DOCTYPE, you'll get quirks mode, which we wanted to avoid. That's why we went with the shortest string we could find that triggered standards mode, namely "".

I agree that it's not ideal, but I couldn't really see a way around it.