The W3C has posted a new working draft of HTML 5. "This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability." There are also drafts of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 and HTML 5 Publication Notes. The latter contains a convenient list of changes since the January 22 draft:
- Implementation and authoring details around the
pingattribute have changed.<meta http-equiv=content-type>is now a conforming way to set the character encoding.- API for the
canvaselement has been cleaned up. Text support has been added.globalStorageis now restricted to the same-origin policy and renamed tolocalStorage. Related event dispatching has been clarified.postMessage()API changed. Only the origin of the message is exposed, no longer the URI. It also requires a second argument that indicates the origin of the target document.- Drag and drop API has got clarification. The
dataTransferobject now has atypesattribute indicating the type of data being transferred.- The
melement is now calledmark.- Server-sent events has changed and gotten clarification. It uses a new format so that older implementations are not broken.
- The
figureelement no longer requires a caption.- The
olelement has a newreversedattribute.- Character encoding detection has changed in response to feedback.
- Various changes have been made to the HTML parser section in response to implementation feedback.
- Various changes to the editing section have been made, including adding
queryCommandEnabled()and related methods.- The
headersattribute has been added fortdelements.- The
tableelement has a newcreateTBody()method.- MathML support has been added to the HTML parser section. (SVG support is still awaiting input from the SVG WG.)
- Author defined attributes have been added. Authors can add attributes to elements in the form of
data-nameand can access these through the DOM usingdataset[name]on the element in question.- The
qelement has changed to require punctation inside rather than having the browser render it.- The
targetattribute can now have the value_blank.- The
showModalDialogAPI has been added.- The
document.domainAPI has been defined.- The
sourceelement now has a newpixelratioattribute useful for videos that have some kind encoding error.bufferedBytes,totalBytesandbufferingThrottledDOM attributes have been added to thevideoelement.- Media
beginevent has been renamed toloadstartfor consistency with the Progress Events specification.charsetattribute has been added toscript.- The
iframeelement has gained thesandboxandseamlessattributes which provide sandboxing functionality.- The
ruby,rtandrpelements have been added to support ruby annotation.- A
showNotification()method has been added to show notification messages to the user.- Support for
beforeprintandafterprintevents has been added.