23 Jan

HTML 5 – what caught my eye

I’ve been looking over the HTML5 drafts and HTML4 – HTML5 differences doc, and here’s a list of bits that caught my eye, and why.

textarea now supports wrap again. This is cool if you’ve got a text box that takes code listings (which I do).
input element supports: datetime|datetime-local|date|month|week|time|number|range|email|url – perfect for validation.
manifest attribute, lending more support to offline (web) apps.
The strike tag is being binned. The funny thing being all the blogs that use the tag to indicate a correction will, without an update (and if they’re in standards mode), have the mistake plugged back in. Then again, the browsers will probably keep the tag.
name attribute is being striped away from forms and the like (obviously not inputs elements). No more excuses IE.
getElementsByClassName. Need I say more?
classList. We will be able to use methods such as has(), add(), remove() and toggle() to manipulate classes on elements. I can almost smell the library changes.

You should follow me on Twitter here I'll tweet about JavaScript, HTML 5 and other such gems (amongst usual tweet-splurges)

3 Responses to “HTML 5 – what caught my eye”

Andreas February 6th, 2008 at 5:41 pm

I’m really looking forward to the new form-features and the new JS.

About the strike-element. Isn’t it plenty more common to use the (more appropriate) del-element to mark up corrected/deleted text?

I’ve never used strike and my text-to-html-function turns -del- into del, not ~~del~~ (granted, I’ve written it myself, but I think Textile also uses del rather than strike).

But if they remove strike, why not remove b and i as well?
Andreas February 6th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Sorry, that should read:

my text-to-html-function turns -del- into <del>del</del>, not <strike>del</strike>
Blog Author Remy Sharp February 6th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

@Andreas – you’re right, I should correct the post. I realised that it was del that’s typically used for this function – but good point about the b and i.