Molly Holzschlag talked about HTML5 (yes, apparently the convention is no space between HTML and 5) at the MIX 10 conference. I didn’t get any ground-breaking knowledge into the workings of, say, the <video /> tag, but I did get some insights into what’s happening with HTML5 that I’d like to share. For a more technical reference to HTML5, Holzschlag recommended Dive into HTML5.
You might have noticed that I did not link HTML5 to W3C’s specification of the language, but rather to the Wikipedia entry. The reason for that is not just the entry on Wikipedia is much easier to read than any academical spec, but also that W3C’s spec is not necessarily the official spec – or least not the only recognized spec. Molly Holzschlag explained how members of the XHTML 2.0 working group in 2004 grew tired of the slow progress and seemingly wrong direction of what was at the time supposed to be the next generation of HTML, and formed their own working group known as WHAT-WG. These “cowboys”, as Holzschlag likes to call them, very quickly (that is, they did in less than a year!) reached consensus on a new spec and further managed to get all the major browser vendors on board. As a result, W3C eventually shut down their XHTML 2 working group and started their own HTML5 working which adapts and formalizes the WHAT-WG spec into the the long legal specs we know and love … right.
So what is HTML5, really? Is it just the a couple of new tags and features such as built-in client-side form validation? That’s a big part of it, but to be more specific, Holzschlag explained, the term HTML5 covers at least three things: The “cowboy-spec” by WHAT-WG, the “approved” spec by W3C, and then the “umbrella” technology that everybody else talks about. Just as AJAX as a term covers much than sending asynchronous javascript and XML, HTML5 has almost become synonymous with “Web 3.0″ and covers everything that the next generations of browsers will support. And that’s fine, as long as we realize what we are talking about when we say HTML5.
In the Thuesday morning keynote Microsoft announced great enthusiasm about HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9. They are dedicated to get the same markup work across all browsers, but at the same time they are completely in line with an interesting thing Molly Holzschlag said: “Implementation always trumps specification”. So the IE9 team made a tool that crawled the 7000 biggest websites on the Internet and analyzed what features currently missing in IE8 are used the most. So in a very pragmatic way, IE9 will support what people already use and introduce all the new aspects of HTML5.
If you speak Danish, make sure you check out the podcast Daniel Frost has recorded here at MIX featuring me and two other developers talking about our experiences from the first day of the conference.