It was 1995 when Tim Barners-Lee published the first formal specifications for HTML (Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0). I was in the university at that time, and used internet to download guitar tabs using the terminals of the mainframe with a bandwidth around 100 bytes/sec :). Internet goes very dramatic change until today. Technology starts pushing the boundaries between the physical world and virtual world. However HTML stayed as the core building block. It is very normal for it to adapt the change in requirements. Today allmost all communication, gaming and assistance devices support HTML.
The current working draft version is HTML 5.0. You can view latest editor version here.
Today I had a free time and check the specs. The first thing that hits my eyes was audio and video tags. Until this time, media files are used without any standars. Some developers prefer flash to render video, others use quicktime and windows media player. You need to download the relevant plugins to view the video files. Also the developers should add different HTML tags, and possibly javascript codes, to view and control the videos. With the aid of standard video and audio tags, the user agent will be responsible to render the video. The developer will add standard HTML codes regardless of the media format used in videos. Also for indexing sites, like Google video, these standardization will yield considerably much less work to index the videos.
Another interesting tag is the canvas tag. With this tag, the developers will be able to dynamicaly generate images on the client side using JavaScript API. If it is supported by the wide range of used agents and devices, it can replace some proprietary tools and methods (like server side generation of images, or plugins like Adobe Flash). Canvas supports (not so) advanced graphics commands like transformation (for scaling and rotation) and shadows.
One common use of HTML is to display a list of records, like the phone numbers, the bank account history, the list of friends etc. HTML 5.0 introduces a new tag called datagrid to simplify and standardize these types of displays. Traditionally, such data are rendered using the tables. Datagrid allows typed data to be presented in an interactive form to the user. The data can be hierarchical (tree structure) or flat (simple table). It has standard api functions to manipulate and interact with the datagrid. However this section is commented out in the current working draft version. I'm not sure datagrid will be in the final version or not.
The specification is currently under development. However it is promising that people from Apple, Mozilla and Opera are working together for the specifications that they should obey :).
That's all for now.
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