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The Top Ten Best Things About HTML 5

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html-source The Word Wide Web has grown at an astounding pace and is pretty ingrained in a lot of our daily lives – you’re reading it right now. Part of the reason it has been so successful has been the flexibility and ease of use of the basic language of web pages, HTML.

Most web sites are developed in HTML 4 (first released in 1997) or XHTML (from 2000). Considering the rapid change all around the web, why hasn’t there been a new version, and what’s next for the Web? One reason we haven’t seen new versions is the aforementioned flexibility. There have been plenty of developments, from blogging software and other content management systems on the server side to CSS, AJAX, and embedded Flash video on the front end.

Microformats are a part of this and will be a big part of the future too. But all the web developers in the house should get up to speed on HTML 5, which looks to be the future of the Web.

I’ve been watching what the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has been doing with HTML 5 ever since I took a gander at the W3C’s XHTML 2 spec and figured out that they were mostly adding annoyance and removing backwards compatibility. Guys I respect, like Eric Meyer, seemed to agree. The WHATWG decided to work on their own ideas and came up with HTML, which was eventually adopted by the W3C as well.

I haven’t taken a look in a while but Marcia Zeng mentioned the HTML 5 spec in an email recently and it got me interested in checking back in. I have to say, for the most part, it’s looking very interesting.

So I decided to put together a quick list of my top 10 new things in HTML 5:

  1. The <nav> element. This will be great for the billions of navbars we web developers have been coding up for the past 10 years. Things like this will help reduce the problem of div soup and make structure more apparent.
  2. The <header> and <footer> elements. See the last entry and add in the billions of page headers and footers we’ve produced as well. Semantically meaningful tags like these can only help browser plugin writers, search engine programmers, and other hackers to come up with cool new features.
  3. The death of the dreaded <font> tag. This should have been banished as soon as CSS was widely supported. It was a pain in the rear to use back in the 1990s when coding by hand, and was even worse when inserted by GUI tools like FrontPage.
  4. The continued usefulness of the <img> element. You may be wondering how we could make web pages without the image element, but XHTML2 only included it grudgingly, recommending everyone use <object> instead. The problem is that just about anything could be an object, the tag is almost meaningless. Why not replace all tags with <thing>?
  5. The <audio> and <video> elements. There’s been some controversy about this, because the W3C originally recommended use of the open source Ogg formats but later recanted. Still, it will be nice to embed audio and video as easily and consistently as images are used now.
  6. New <input> types for dates, urls, etc. When you have a form that requires a user input a date or some other specialized data, you choices have been to present a plain text input or jazz things up with JavaScript to make it a bit more usable. HTML 5 adds specific types for these cases.
  7. The conenteditable API. This will be really interesting if it’s fully supported. In Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web, documents would be easily editable. Wikis get us almost there, but a standard editing API would be even better.
  8. A required attribute for form inputs. This won’t mean we can stop checking incoming data on the server side (users can still POST arbitrary data with the right tools) but it should remove the need for millions of little field-checking JavaScripts.
  9. The <figure> and <legend> elements. This will make it a little easier to associate captions and other text to images. Look for CMSs and image search engines to take advantage of these tags.
  10. An open development process. Want to keep an eye on development? Got an idea or concern about the spec? Hop on one of the mailing lists. Open standards are great for promoting compatibility and competition, so open development of the standards just makes sense.

The power of microformats

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Considering a Descent A few months ago I attended a really interesting talk by Eric Meyer where he touched on the use of microformats.  You might know Eric from his excellent O’Reilly Press CSS books.

What are microformats?  Before giving an example, I’ll give a little context.  When Tim Berners-Lee created the web, he tried to make HTML simple, flexible, and meaningful.  He succeeded on the first two counts but the third was quickly left by the wayside – many designers didn’t care what a particular tag meant, so long as it could be used for page layout.  The use of tables to arrange graphic elements instead of holding tabular data is a perfect example.

So Berners-Lee has been talking for years about the next step – the semantic web.  In the semantic web, tags are used to say what a particular piece of content is, with all styling done with stylesheets.  There is, of course, more to the semantic web than just separating content and presentation, after all you can work that way with HTML and CSS now.  One other key component is the web of trust, where people and web sites are able to describe relationships to each other so that search engines can help you find trustworthy content automatically.

Unfortunately, the semantic web has not really taken off.  There have been lots of meetings and XML schemas but it’s all too complicated, the process is too bureaucratic, and everything is being designed from the top down.

This is where microformats come in.  Let’s say you have a blog and you’ve tagged all your articles.  You’d like to let search engines and aggregators like Technorati know what your tags are.  But HTML doesn’t have anything like this:

<tag>semantic web<tag>

So what do you do?  Simple, use the rel-tag microformat:

<a href=”http://example.com/tag/semantic+web” rel=”tag”>semantic web</a>

The microformat makes use of existing html tags and attributes and just follows simple conventions.  But now that this little bit of meaning can be interpreted by spiders and other programs, we’ve actually added a pretty powerful bit of functionality to the web.

Most blog software, including WordPress, includes does microformatting for you.  If install my tag cloud plugin Altocumulous, and view source, you can see for yourself.

For intranet purposes, the hCard and hCalendar microformats look promising.  Take a look at microformats.org to see why I think so.  I’ll write more on it later.

How do you set up a PHP development environment?

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DSCN1377-1Are you a budding web developer wondering where to start?  An old hand looking for new tools?  Let me tell you a little bit about how I do my PHP / web development work, and maybe some it will be of use to you.

I am starting up some work on Mealographer again.  It definitely needs it, I did a usability test about a year ago and still haven’t fixed the issues I uncovered.  I haven’t been doing a lot of work in PHP recently, at my day job is all Java all the time.  I used to be happy with a text editor, a server somewhere and a browser, but since I’ve been using Eclipse I’ve become spoiled by better tools.

So what do you need to get started?  If you just want to play around, all you need is:

A text editor.  You can use Notepad, but I’ve used HTMLKit in the past.  It’s free and it does basic stuff like syntax highlighting nicely.

A server.  You can set everything up on a remote server, many have PHP accounts for as low as $5/month.  Right now I use Site5 [referral link].  I also want to give a shout out to Q5Media, though PHP isn’t their main thing.

A browser.  This is pretty basic, but worth mentioning.  You need Firefox, which is free to download.  You’ll also want to test things in IE, which you probably already had.

You can do real work with just the above.  It’s worth taking advantage of all the great tools out there, though, including:

An integrated development environment (IDE) – I’m pretty happy with Eclipse for Java development (or the related IBM RAD 6).  What about for PHP?  Right now I’m trying to decide between PHPEclispe and the PDT plugin.  Anyone have an opinion on which way to go?

A local development server – If you want to run PHP locally on windows, you can install Apache or get PHP working on IIS.  In my experience, though, you can’t beat WAMPSERVER – it includes Apache, MySQL and PHP and makes configuration pretty easy.

Source control – There’s no way to keep track of a project of any real size without a change management system.  I have used CVS a lot, and SmartCVS is a good free client.  There are also CVS plugins for Eclipse.  I have heard a lot of good things about Subversion as well.

Web developer plugins for Firefox – seriously, if you don’t have these, you might as well tie your hand behind your back when writing JavaScript of CSS.  Here’s a good list of Firefox plugins.

So that’s what I use – what am I missing?  Post suggestions in the comments below.