Hello HTML5
by James
HTML has just reached a major milestone with the publication of six working drafts of the markup language’s specification (via).
Despite being technical documents, these specs also make for interesting reading if you’re at all curious about the evolution of the web’s mother tongue. A great place to start is the history of HTML in the main HTML5 spec: there’s some detail here about how HTML5 came to be, as well as some brief information about the aborted XHTML2 effort. This section helps you understand why HTML5 exists at all.
Next, you’ll want to know what elements are available for HTML5 authors: for this, start with “The elements of HTML” (again, in the main spec). This section lists HTML5′s tags and explains how to use them; new tags such as section, nav, article, and aside are covered here.
As a web developer, you’re going to be writing HTML5, so also read “The HTML syntax” for more detail on how HTML5 documents should be structured. The section called “Writing HTML documents” is especially useful, and includes information on the doctype (previously important but now “a mostly useless, but required, header”).
If you’re put off by technical language, be reassured that the spec makes an effort to be readable by humans too: after the spec for doctype syntax, for example, we get this summary:
In other words,
<!DOCTYPE HTML>, case-insensitively
Despite all the HTML5 websites out there, I think it’s really important for developers to go to the source and read the original spec: it’s surprisingly accessible, and even glancing at it will help you understand where HTML5 is coming from.