The past and the Future - Good Developments

Firstly. the past, thanks to Notes from Phazm for the great news that Microsoft are now forcing upgrades to IE7, no more pressing no to updates and making us developers miserable. Hopefully this means that developers can dump IE 6 (the worst browser since Mac IE5.5) and start producing sites that use the full richness of modern DHTML.

Which brings me neatly on to the future, HTML 5. I have now taken a proper look at the spec and I can’t wait to be using this with CSS 3 although I can’t see that happening for five or six years yet based on previous experience.

While HTML 4 is based on original HTML as developed by Berners Lee, which was designed to mark up a web made of scientific documents and the like; HTML 5 addresses the web as it has matured.

The easiest part to understand are the new tags which I think will remove the div soup that most documents have become since the table mess was sorted out a few years ago.

Many of these tags help semantically mark up container code that is currently using the ubiquitous div, such as

• section represents a generic document or application section. It can be used together with h1-h6 to indicate the document structure.
• article represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article.
• aside represents a piece of content that is only slightly related to the rest of the page.
• header represents the header of a section.
• footer represents a footer for a section and can contain information about the author, copyright information, et cetera.
• nav represents a section of the document intended for navigation.

Others give us better form elements, I can’t wait for the new input type attributes, no more javascript validation for the following it will be done by the client:

• datetime
• datetime-local
• date
• month
• week
• time
• number
• range
• email
• url

There is a smattering of other tags that add markup richness to HTML, for example details and meter, more functional elements such as canvas and video, and a ton of new attributes.

The only thing I’m not sure about is the depreciation of the target attribute for the a tag. I’m, guessing that I am missing something.

Roll on HTML 5 compliant browsers, especially with CSS3!

Some text quoted from “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4” working draft 22nd Jan