W3C announces HTML 5

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 24th January 2008
Comments (20) Stumble
The new HTML 5 spec makes great bedtime reading if you suffer from insomnia.

The new HTML 5 spec makes great bedtime reading if you suffer from insomnia.

The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for setting standards for the Interweb, has announced the first working draft for the next version of the HTML standard.

The next edition of the markup language, somewhat unsurprisingly called HTML 5, marks the first significant change to the HTML standard in ten years.

The new release reflects the growth of the web from its origins as a text-based medium through whizzy 90s .GIF graphics to its current incarnation as a multimedia platform. Accordingly, HTML 5 will bring new APIs for drawing dynamic two-dimensional content within the browser, better ways of embedding videos, client-side persistent data storage via a JavaScript API and embedded databases, push data connections that will end the need to keep hitting 'refresh' on your webmail, and even Wiki-style editable pages.

Perhaps most interesting is the stuff that didn't make it into the standard, with frames support being ditched completely in favour of a combination of tables and cascading style sheets to control your page layouts. Its a move I for one will certainly welcome: my first tentative steps onto the web were via an early version of Netscape, and frames and Netscape didn't mix particularly well.

Parts of the old HTML 4 standard deprecated by HTML 5 aren't going to vanish overnight, of course. Browsers will continue to support HTML 4 markup for quite some time – possibly forever. It'll also be a while before browsers have implemented everything detailed within the working draft, with Opera currently leading the way for HTML support.

If you're wondering about all the new features introduced in the draft – especially if you're a webmaster wanting to get a headstart on making your pages HTML 5 compliant – you can read the full working draft at the W3C website.

Looking forward to grappling with the new features, or is plain-old HTML 1 good enough for you? Share your thoughts on the new standard over in the forums.
Quote The Chugnut 24th January 2008, 10:47
There's some cool stuff in there. Dropping frames was a good call, I'm pleased with that too.

2012 for Internet Explorer support?
Quote Darkedge 24th January 2008, 11:51
Frames going at last - horrible things
Quote DXR_13KE 24th January 2008, 12:06
what is so bad about frames?

edit: still have to learn web design.....
Quote OleJ 24th January 2008, 12:07
RIP frames. You will only be missed by... uhm... by.... hmm.. guess not.

As both Mozilla and Microsoft (amongst others) have been in on development of the draft we can hope that browser compliance is reached fairly quickly.

Now we only need W3C to finish the draft. 2012 may not be that far off considering everything ;)
Quote Aterius Gmork 24th January 2008, 12:31
Hopefully there won't be any differences in interpretation of the code between Firefox and Internet Explorer. My website, while looking fine on literary every web browser out there, just craps out horribly on Internet Explorer.

If you got any suggestions for that problem feel free to drop me a PM. ;)
Quote antiHero 24th January 2008, 12:37
Wohoo no more frames!!!!! I hated (still hate) them so much. CSS is the way to go, even without tables.
Quote [USRF]Obiwan 24th January 2008, 12:51
So does anybody know how i can putt a wysiwyg editor into a page then? The editor i use, used a iframe to act as the editor replacement for a textarea. Or is a Iframe different from a frame?

Not to mention the bs with crossbrowser compatibility. loose/strict/xhtml1/etc/etc. They cant even make html4 work correctly so why bother with html5.
Quote Firehed 24th January 2008, 13:50
Well to be fair, frames have always been by far the easiest method to get static navigation on a page and back in the day of completely static sites was really the only thing you could use to separate something from something else. But they won't be missed.
Quote cpemma 24th January 2008, 14:50
Quote:
Originally Posted by OleJ
As both Mozilla and Microsoft (amongst others) have been in on development of the draft we can hope that browser compliance is reached fairly quickly.
MS have always been on the W3C committee but the M$-bashers at the table have often taken a contrary view to IE's practice just out of anti-M$ cussedness. With the infamous IE5 box model they could have said, "Hey, that's a good idea!" ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Beach
In CSS/HTML it seems logical to me that the width of an element should be independent of the padding applied within it. If I change the amount of internal padding within an element, I don't want the width of the element to be affected. Unfortunately, the W3C has decided that width is dependent on padding, and the minority browsers (Firefox, Opera et al) render in this illogical style.
Quote Hamish 24th January 2008, 14:50
i hope they decide not to drop the style attribute from everything but <font> though, that kinda sucks :\
Quote ssj12 24th January 2008, 15:59
does the death of frames include iframes? I dear god hope not, half my websites have iframes. I want better support for iframes in IE so it looks correct. Then again IE is a Microsoft product which means its low-quality anyways.
Quote Robotrix 24th January 2008, 19:17
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Chugnut
There's some cool stuff in there. Dropping frames was a good call, I'm pleased with that too.

2012 for Internet Explorer support?

For something significant like that, they could bring it as an update for IE8. Or if the standard is finalised in time they could put it in before IE8 is released.

I think 2012 is stretching it a bit.
Quote ChiperSoft 25th January 2008, 01:03
There are a lot of situations where frames are a much easier way to go, like if you need to update portions of the page without wanting to do a full reload. Sure you can do it via AJAX, but frames are so much easier, and you know it'll work on every browser.

And, lets be honest, Microsoft has no good reason to commit money to making internet explorer compliant, even if it IS their own standard.
Quote Hamish 25th January 2008, 02:31
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiperSoft
There are a lot of situations where frames are a much easier way to go, like if you need to update portions of the page without wanting to do a full reload. Sure you can do it via AJAX, but frames are so much easier, and you know it'll work on every browser.
frames are nasty and really inflexible, about time they died
ajax is a much, much better way to update/change portions of a website, it works in pretty much every browser in common use today
and with a framework like prototype.js etc. its just as easy if not easier than frames, my first working ajax page took me about a minute to create :p
Quote ZERO <ibis> 25th January 2008, 02:46
If I can no longer use iframes what do i use to replace them... if anyone knows please post. All i need is the name of the command and I can look the rest up on Google. (please nothing with java though I want to make it very complaint.)

Or maybe they are keeping iframes, well i know what I am reading next week.
Quote completemadness 25th January 2008, 23:54
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Chugnut
2012 for Internet Explorer to support HTML4?
There, fixed :p
Quote DougEdey 26th January 2008, 00:51
woo, more AJAX, cos that helps legacy support.
Quote 8igdave 26th January 2008, 16:33
dont know much about web design, so what does this actually mean for people browsing the web? Any signifcant changes? Faster loading times of pages (not that its really a problem with broadband now)?

Anything which will benefit me or just makign web designers lives easyer?
Quote cjmUK 26th January 2008, 21:59
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamish
i hope they decide not to drop the style attribute from everything but <font> though, that kinda sucks :\

?

Bearing in mind that FONT is a deprecated elemnt in HTML4 anyway, I hope it is entirely unsupported.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssj12
does the death of frames include iframes? I dear god hope not, half my websites have iframes. I want better support for iframes in IE so it looks correct.

I haven't read the proposals, but I would be astonished if IFRAMES are removed; they are a legitimate structure in HTML, if somewhat overused/misused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 8igdave
dont know much about web design, so what does this actually mean for people browsing the web? Any signifcant changes? Faster loading times of pages (not that its really a problem with broadband now)?

Anything which will benefit me or just makign web designers lives easyer?

If it makes web developers lives easier, that in itself will have a benefit to the end user. Especially if all the major browsers support it quickly and consistently (big IF...).
Quote Ending Credits 26th January 2008, 23:44
They should find some way to fix the CSS percentage rounding error although now thinking about it you could just make the last block fill the rest of the container although with some things this may not be possible.

On a side note, Javascript: good or bad?
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