HTML 5

Interesting insight into the future of web markup. A List Apart have produced a useful preview of the newest version of HTML. The current version of HTML, version 4, has been with us since the mid 90s, and quite honestly its looking really dated. In the mid 90s, flash had only just been launched (and was only capable of really simple animation), embeding sound onto a web page was almost impossible (remember using a dialup modem?) and knowbody had even thought of streaming video? Well, we take all these things for granted now, but i order to get them all to work, we have to hack HTML to do things that it was never designed to do. HTML did get a minor bump with the introduction of XHTML, but that only reinforced what we already knew, it didn’t bring any new features with it.

So why HTML5? well, with this new version, HTML will be the centre of a complete web publishing API, with built-in support for flash, sound, video and next-greneration javascript. The core language of HTML also gets loads of new semantic markup tags, bringing improved support for mobile devices and users with disabilities.

When can we expect this HTML5 thing then? well, its not been approved yet by the W3C, and support in Internet Explorer is almost non-existent, but other browsers like Safari, Firefox and Opera are all slowly adding support. It may not be here now, but it is going to be the future of Internet