HTML5

Via Wired, here’s the current draft HTML5, representing “the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML“. It was published this past Tuesday (1/22) as their first draft. I don’t know if it’s common to have such language included as part of these documents, but close to the opening one starts to get the distinct feeling that reaching this point in the document’s life was not easily accomplished:

The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the contents of the specification. Indeed, for any section of the specification, one can usually find many members of the working group or of the W3C as a whole who object strongly to the current text, the existence of the section at all, or the idea that the working group should even spend time discussing the concept of that section.

Got it…(awkward)

According to Firefox’s print preview, this sucker is a solid 238 page printout (including the table of contents), and as interested as I might be, it’s going to have be a “no” to reading this right now. Two reasons: 1. my eyes are fading fast 2. here are the cliffnotes (a more manageable 13 pages). To read the cool stuff, head straight to section four, “APIs”. There’s a new <canvas> tag in which graphics can be dynamically generated (i.e. games). There’s native support for drag-and-drop items via a new draggable attribute. It even mentions client-side storage of data using SQL statements. Neato.

Of course, all items subject to change. It’s still a “working draft” after all.