Webvisions: Intro to HTML5 by Scott Vandehey

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.