Ever since the WHATWG decided to pick up on development of the good ‘ol HTML that hasn’t been worked on for over eight years (since HTML 4.01), the web designer and browser community has been getting pretty noisy. Right now, things are gonna take a TIGHT turn. A good turn, perhaps, for the semantic Web.

Well, those dudes at IBM developerWorks have come up with a whole new array of elements for HTML5, like the following:

<!--
The dudes at the WHATWG and IBM are geniuses.
This will drive XHTML 2 developers mad, I tell you.
-->
<header>
<section>
<nav>
<article>
<aside>
<figure /><!-- Why did IBM use XML-style empty-element-self-closes? -->
<time>
<video />
<audio />
<footer>

It’s crazy. What’ll happen with XHTML 2.0? What’ll Microsoft do? Internet Explorer already has enough problems supporting some of XHTML, and much of CSS 2.1 (IE7 isn’t working hard enough either). I’d rather use XML to mark my pages then style them with CSS or even XSLT (does IE7 support it well?).

If you ask me, I think layout engine developers (layout engines like Gecko, Presto and the despicable Trident) are going to have a whale of a time. I wonder what Microsoft will say about the arrival of HTML5, though. Maybe IE8 will support it (I mean come on, I bet it’ll only arrive when Windows 7 is done), maybe not. I just hope its CSS handling reaches our standard. Oh and by the way, the W3C Valid XHTML and CSS check-by-referrer URIs don’t work anymore. Microsoft, do you hate our standards so much, lol?

Whatever happens, HTML5 and XHTML 2.0 won’t be here until a couple years later, so I don’t have to worry right now. NOVALISTIC 3.0 will be valid XHTML 1.0, that’s for sure. I’ll have to decide whether I should migrate to either of the above when they do arrive though, which right now is the least of my Internet concerns.

Here are a couple resources on this subject:

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