HTML 5

(This is a cross-post from the mailing list, reformatted as HTML.) Since February, I’ve been working on writing a detailed specification for browser editing, primarily the document.execCommand() and document.queryCommand*() methods. These were created by Microsoft in the 1990s and were subsequently adopted in some form by all other browsers, and today browsers have to implement [...]

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Next week Wednesday, August 3, the W3C HTML5 Last Call review period ends. Consider taking another look and giving some feedback! Here is a quick rundown of what happened last week: The proposed download attribute made it into the HTML specification. Specify it on an a element to force the referenced resource to be downloaded [...]

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First thing’s first. Hi my name is Liam Hockley, I am a recent addition to the admin team on the WHATWG forums and I have been working on improving the site over the past couple of weeks. (forums.whatwg.org) The first thing I did, was update the forum software from the severely outdated phpBB2, to the [...]

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As support for WebM is ramping up, Web authors can start using it. However, since not everyone has a WebM-enabled browser, yet, using WebM on your site poses the problem of having to explain to the visitors of your site how they can view WebM. It is inefficient for everyone to have to do this [...]

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In 2009 we announced that the HTML5 specification at the WHATWG was progressing to Last Call. The plan at the time was to finish the specification this year and publish a snapshot of “HTML5″ in 2012. However, shortly after that we realised that the demand for new features in HTML remained high, and so we [...]

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The WHATWG Wiki portal has a nice section describing HTML vs. XHTML differences, as well as specifics of a polyglot HTML document that also would be able to serve HTML5 document as valid XML document. I’d like to review what it takes to transform an HTML5 polyglot document into a valid XHTML5 document: it appears, [...]

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I’ve started a page on the wiki to document the rationale for the decisions made about the HTML specification. There are two goals for this document: Explain why things are the way they are Explain the difference between multiple similar elements by providing example usages. One person can not possibly write the entire thing so [...]

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For a brief period today, there were no outstanding e-mails or bugs on the specs, and so I took that opportunity to transition us here at the WHATWG to the next stage of HTML5’s development: Last Call! This affects three specs at the WHATWG: HTML5 Web Workers Microdata vocabularies There’s also a version of the [...]

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Over the past few weeks, Google has been preparing and then running a usability study to test the microdata feature of HTML5. Methodology We first created three different variants based on the original microdata proposal: One based on what the spec said (documentation) One trying to put types in an explicit itemtype=”" attribute and moving [...]

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What’s the right way to spell “HTML5”? The short answer is: “HTML5” (without a space).

People in the WHATWG community have commonly referred to HTML5 as “HTML5” for quite a while. However, when the W3C HTML WG voted on adopting “Web Applications 1.0” the question about the title said “HTML 5”. Thus, the W3C HTML WG [...]

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