In the past I’ve always been a bit lazy about keeping up with the cutting edge of standards and making sure the sites I develop are using the latest technologies. Part of the reason is because I’m so busy I have to wait until a technology goes mainstream enough that it get wind of it and to not use it would be to fall behind, or when I need to use it go get over the latest development speedbump.
The second reason is that the majority of the customers for the site that takes up most of my time are all in the NHS which used to refuse to get their PCs updated from Netscape 4 and IE5, so I had to be delibrately behind standards-wise.
Recently though, what with the emphasis on security, spam, viruses etc, everyone seems to be moving on to the latest browsers (ok – IE6 & FF1), plus the workload has been easing up a little so I’ve been moving some of the less updated sites from their older layouts to div/css style designs.
While I was doing this I thought I’d nip over to the W3C and find out what was progressing as far as the “next version” was concerned. Turns out it’s called Web Applications 1.0, but everyone seems to be calling it HTML5. I haven’t had chance to read the entire spec (it’s a bit to big), but having a glance around it there’s quite a bit in there that I like.
The emphasis as I see it seems to be on providing tags and elements to be used specifically for certain sections of the page. There are elements such as:
- nav (for navigation),
- article for the page’s main content or a blog post for example
- section to break a page into… sections.
This should help a lot for larger sites when they’re creating templates for different areas of sites and also for SEO as it allows the search engines to identify which areas are considered “most important” by the developer without having to rely on only H1 and Title tags (I know there’s more to it than that – don’t start in the comments). I like this approach and it ahould be very yseful for most of the sites I develop.
The second thing I noticed was there was no tags in there for styling – everything to do with the asthetics of a page can now be left to CSS. Brilliant!
I also notced a few more onWhatever event handlers in there which I haven’t thought of any uses for yet but I’m sure I will over time. I like these as it means that we can develop more Web 2.0 type stuff without having to rely on flash, Java or other such technologies.
All in all, I like the progress thats been made but ordinarily I’d just forget about it now. That is until I noticed this on Slashdot saying that Apple, Opera and Mozilla are pushing for this standard to be adopted. That means that if it is, all the major browsers (apart from IE) will be motivated to get the standard built in, which should in turn push Microsoft to follow suit about 15 years later…