W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5

Lachlan Hunt writes: "The W3C annonced that the HTML Working Group has today published the first public working draft of HTML 5 — A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. It's been over 9 months since the working group began in March 2007 and this long awaited milestone has finally been achieved.

"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web..." Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively. Other features make it easier to represent familiar page elements, including ; (for navigation), and (for assigning a caption to a photo or other embedded content). Authors write HTML 5 using either a "classic" HTML syntax or an XML syntax, according to application demands.

An updated draft of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 has also been published to help guide you through the changes."