Draft HTML 5: does it matter for e-books?
By Robert Nagle
You may have noticed the announcement of a working draft for HTML 5. Of course, a browser implementation of HTML 5 is probably two years in the offing, but I immediately noticed some differences from HTML 4.
- Lots of new elements: section, article, aside, header, footer, nav (to mark a section for navigation), dialog, figure
- hr now represents a “paragraph-level thematic break” (and not specifically the line itself).
- removal of various attributes (mostly those which are already handled in css)
- attributes for ajaxy stuff (contenteditable, draggable, irrelevant)
- APIs for multimedia, messaging, history (to avoid breaking the back button).
- other esoteric stuff over my head.
If you look at the draft itself, you’ll find a lot of boxes that say “well, that clearly needs more” or “this section has a large number of outstanding comments and will likely to be rewritten or removed from the spec.” So nothing is set in stone.
(See this slashdot discussion for some specific reservations by developers in the trenches. There was also a to-do about whether HTML 5 should mandate support for open media codecs like .ogg).
I’m not sure HTML 5 will solve the world’s problems, but it’s interesting that many of the new elements in HTML 5 seem designed to provide more meaningful markup for longer portions of text. In HTML 4, there was no easy way to refer to Table of Contents or navigation sections, and no easy way to specify sections (except by using H1, H2 tags, etc).
But if HTML 5 is implemented fairly well, it would probably easier to render a single html page in a book-centric way.
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