It's kind of hard to believe that it's almost been a decade since HTML 4.01 was made official. However, it has taken browsers a while to recognise the standard, and this process continues today. I was pleased to see that the W3C has released the first draft of HTML 5 with its goal of creating Semantic HTML.
Semantic HTML
The impetus behind Semantic HTML is the creation of HTML documents that are void of any reference to how the HTML is presented. This means that Semantic HTML contains only the implied meaning of data via the use of the appropriate tags. This has been the goal of the separation of content and presentation, and HTML 5 is pushing it closer to reality.
A couple of examples of Semantic HTML include only using the table element for tabular data, and actual header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>) are used to mark important data on a page. The creation of Semantic HTML introduces a number of new features and banishes some older elements.
New additions in HTML 5
HTML 5's new additions focus on Semantic HTML by allowing Web developers to easily assign meaning to content via HTML tags. The following list provides a sampling of these elements:
|> article: Represents an independent piece of content within a page.
|> audio: Provides multimedia support.
|> canvas: Renders dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly, such as graphs, games, and so forth.
|> dialog: Marks up a conversation.
|> embed: Provides support for plug-in content.
|> footer: Represents the footer of a section.
|> header: Represents the header of a section.
|> nav: Represents a section of a document whose purpose is navigation.
|> section: Represents a generic section of a document.
|> video: Provides multimedia support.
This subset of new elements demonstrates that presentational HTML is gone. Turn your attention to CSS when approaching the task of properly delivering content to the user community. One worry with working with a new technology is backward compatibility.
The HTML 5 standard includes two conformance requirements for Web developers and the software used to view the content (the user agent). The user agent section includes guidelines to ensure older HTML is correctly rendered, so there should be no worries about breaking existing Web content.
Out with the old
A quick perusal of the first draft of HTML 5 shows that the push towards CSS for presentation continues, as relevant elements have been removed from HTML 5. These elements include font manipulation with the standard font tag, along with basefont and big.
You will no longer be able to use the underline <u> element for underlining text, and strike is gone as well. It is interesting to see the bold <b> and italics <i> elements are still in place. One element that is often overused is <center>; beginning with HTML 5, you should use CSS to horizontally centre elements.
Numerous attributes have also been removed; for instance, the align, background, and bgcolour attributes have been removed from the body element.
I know the removal of frame-related elements (frame, frameset, and noframes) will receive a resounding cheer from Web developers. The negative impact on accessibility and usability were the final straw for frames. Also, the applet tag has been removed, and the object tag is now the standard.
This is just a quick list of changes; the W3C site offers a detailed list of what has changed from HTML 4 to HTML 5.
More to come
The time for a new HTML version is long overdue. It is driven by the push to separate content from presentation and separate the code.
This is only the first draft of the HTML 5 standard, so changes are likely to occur -- and let's not forget that browser support will be slow to arrive, since the current version is still not fully supported. You should definitely keep an eye on the standard.
What are your thoughts on W3C standards and their usage? Do you develop standards-based Web applications? Share your thoughts with the Web Developer community.
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Jeff, UK - 30/06/08
> I know the removal of frame-related elements (frame, frameset, and noframes) will receive a resounding cheer from Web developers. The negative impact on accessibility and usability ...
Your assumption is not correct.
Imagine a page with two sections - in one section, you click on links, and the other section then displays detailed content. Users must be able to resize the detailed pane to suit their screen resolution and readability requirements.
Cant do that in HTML5 - yes there are thoughts about a resizeable attribute, but NONE of the browsers are planning any support at all for this.
So removal of user resizeable frames in HTML5 has a negative impact on usability.
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Dzhankui - 02/07/08
I concordant with you, Jeff.
First - need to change the browsers to make them possibility to support "all of this"
And second - we can to change any standarts
Design will save the world... :)
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Douglas - 21/08/08
I have never coded in HTML 4.01 prefering to use XHTML and CSS. I rarely use any of the tags that will be depricated so i look forward to HTML 5.
Not as much as i look forward to using XHTML 2.0
As for frames......good ridance.
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cgfddfgd - 03/02/09
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Mike - 01/05/09
I'm so tired of people "hating frames". Frames are very useful for manuals, directories and other closer to Intranet applications. Designers are mostly impractical and only think about pretty flowers to draw on the background, but not about something serious, like information. Information has no fixed size, no fixed height, it's dynamic. There is no substitute to Tables and Frames, however you praise your perverted way of using sexless divs and spans in place of meaningful and powerful tags.
For instance, a persistance content block. How can you keep a part of a page unchanged while navigating throughout the web site? For instance, I want an embedded web radio to keep playing while I browse through the website it's embedded in. How do I make that? Only frames can make this happen, and there is no alternative for that. If I could create an IFRAME and mark it as "persistant", then it would be a true superior mechanism to bulky framesets, making them completely obsolete.
I do not understand how can a feature become obsolete if there is no other feature with same or better functionality. It's like chopping legs off and sewing hands in place of them, simply because legs are uglier than hands, and hands are more standards-compliant.
If I use AJAX for loading content instead of actual browsing, thus keeping static parts of the page untouched, there still will be problems with bookmarking, search engines, context ads, and other things, such as mobile, non-graphic or non-scripting browsers. Same problems which frames are being hated for. So Ajax is not an alternative to frames in terms of partial content loading.
All the changes in HTML seem to be towards making fixed sized promo leaflets, and not rich, information-filled, dynamic multimedia web resoures. I'm working with HTML since 1997, and I'm pretty sick of seeing how people are calling a Web 2.0 something that is more like Web 0.2 beta.
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