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Intro to HTML5
Scott Vandehey
@spaceninja
  • Great history of why HTML5 came into being: 
    • Long version: diveintohtml5.org/past.html
    • Backlash against XHTML2, which would have been too draconian. Would have cause sites with any errors at all to not render. Browser manufacturers hated this.
  • HTML5 Design Principles
    • Support existing content
    • Any new stuff we add should degrade gracefully
    • Pave the cowpaths
      • Let’s look at the way the community is already doing things. Let’s document how people are actually working, and make sure things work that way.
    • Priority of Constituencies
      • users > authors > implementors > specifiers > purity
  • Joke: HTML = How To Meet Ladies
  • Better Forms
    • New input types
      • email
      • telephone (tel)
      • url
      • number
      • and many more…
      • ex:
    • Only small browser enhancements so far, but it is getting there. On the iPhone browser, for example, they optimize the keyboard for the type of input field.
      • prefills the text box with the instructions
      • to avoid javascript or server side validate to validate forms.
      • in the future browsers will do this, include field type validation
    • Create an input field out of anything:
        click me to edit

  • Better Videos/Media
    • Example shown: massive amount of code shown for doing Flash video…
    • In HTML5:
    • Actually, a little more complex, because each browser supports a different format. But you can encode the video multiple times, and then put the source multiple times.
  • New Semantic Elements
    • header
    • footer
    • nav
    • aside
    • article
    • section
  • Simplified Elements
    • doctype:
    • meta: 
    • No type needed for js and css elements
  • How to convert to HTML5 in one easy step
    • Just change the doctype to . You’re done. Because everything is backwards compatible.
  • Browser shims:
    • Add some css:
      section, article, header, footer, nav, aside, hgroup {
        display: block;
      }
    • Also, add some conditional comments to your head for IE
  • Rumors
    • Browsers don’t support HTML5
      • Wrong. All support it to some extent. There’s no reason not to use the parts that work today.
    • Rumor: HTML5 won’t be ready until 2022
      • 2009: W3C working draft
        • browser manufacturers already working to implementing.
      • 2012: W3C recommendation
      • 2022: two complete working implementations
        • This can be ignored… There aren’t two complete implementations of CSS2.1, but we’ve been using that for years. Browser manufacturers get to 95%, and then they quit implementing the spec.