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My HTML 5 Favourites

Posted
24 January 2008
Tagged
HTML

With the W3C publishing the latest HTML 5 working draft and supporting differences from HTML 4 document, I thought I’d list some of my favourite additions and changes:

New Elements

  • figure to associate a caption with some content, such as an image.
  • audio and video can be used for multimedia content.
  • canvas can be used for rendering dynamic graphics such as graphs.
  • datagrid for interactive tabular data.
  • The input element now has some new types: datetime, datetime-local, date, month, week, time, number, range, email and url.

New Attributes

  • The a and area elements have a new attribute called ping that specifies a list of URIs which have to be pinged when the hyperlink is followed.
  • The new autofocus attribute can be specified to focus a form control during page load.
  • The new form attribute allows for controls to be associated with multiple forms.
  • The new required attribute on form controls indicates that the user has to fill in a value in order to submit the form.
  • The input element has several new attributes to specify constraints: autocomplete, min, max, pattern and step.

These are just the specific bits I’m most interested in, take a look at the full HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 document for the full list of new features/changes, in more detail.

Of course, none of this matters for now, as it’s going to be a long time before we get to use any HTML 5 goodness in real applications and sites, but it’s good to see things moving forward.