It’s hard to believe, but the current HTML standards used for a vast majority of the Internet (HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1) have now been in place for more than 8 years – surprising, given the amount of progress that’s been made in rich web applications, video streaming, and social media since then. With the start of the HTML 5 working draft by the World Wide Web Consortium and subsequent integration of some features into modern browsers, however, the development community is beginning to buzz about the future of HTML.
Arguably the most noticeable change will be in the markup itself. Rather than rely on div tags for basic site framework, HTML 5 will introduce tags such as header, footer, nav, section and aside, among others. While not a huge advance from an end-product standpoint, these tags will offer much cleaner semantic markup and aid search engine crawlers in correctly indexing a site.
While most online media players rely on a proprietary third-party technology such as Flash or Silverlight, HTML 5 is working to create standardized video and audio tags for this content. While there is no set codec as of yet (the major browsers have been unable to reach consensus), an example is available for HTML 5 capable browsers at www.youtube.com/html5.
Other notable features on the horizon include native drag and drop, self-validating user input and forms, and a much smaller doctype declaration.
Although new elements haven’t been implemented evenly across all modern browsers, some sites are getting a jump start on the new markup: html5gallery.com
Other Resources:
HTML 5 Working Draft
What a site in CSS 3 and HTML 5 will look like