Wednesday, 23 Jan 2008 6:20PM EST

W3c Releases HTML 5 Public Working Draft

Yesterday, the W3C published two documents that are very important to the future of web development. They released technical reports on HTML 5 and HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. This draft represents a major leap forward for HTML which has not seen an update since HTML 4 was adopted in December of 1999.

The new elements and attributes that have been added into version 5 focus entirely on semantics and structure. In fact, the <font> element as well as all presentational attributes, such as align, width, height, background and style, have been removed in HTML 5. It is clear that by the time this draft is accepted as a standard, CSS will not only be the norm, but will be required.

Besides removing presentational elements and attributes, HTML 5 is also focusing on structure with the additions of several key elements. Most notably, <section>, <article>, <aside>, <header>, <footer> and <nav>. These new elements will be used for easily defining your page structure, rather than having to use <div id="nav"> or <div id="header">. This standardizes what are already the most common designations for these sections of a web page, making both the HTML and CSS code easier to code and read. Other notable elements with a great deal of potential include <dialog> and its child elements <dt> and <dd>, which can be used to mark up a conversation, <figure>, which can associate a caption with some embedded content, <audio> and <video>, for multimedia content, <meter>, for representing measurements, and <datagrid>, which represents and interactive tree list or tabular data.

Form validation will get much easier, as well, with the introduction of 10 new input types; datetime, datetime-local, date, month, week, time, number, range, email and url. These new types mean that the text input type will no longer be a catch-all for any kind of input and browsers will now be able to do the field limiting and validation for you.

There are some notable new attributes as well. The ping attribute in <a> and <area> elements allow for a list of URIs to be pinged when a link is followed. <a> and <area> will also now have the media attribute. value is no longer deprecated for <li> and autofocus can now be specified on an <input> element.

The HTML version 5 specification is exciting news for web developers everywhere as the markup language is set to take its first steps in nearly a decade. Which attributes and elements are you most excited to see? What new tricks do you think you'll be able to pull of with them?