A colleague of mine recently came over to discuss HTML 5 the next major revision of HTML! He wondered what new and beneficial features were in store. The few noticeable ones are:

• New “nav” and “footer” elements
• Canvas tag for immediate bitmap rendering – this is so cool!  No more using gd libraries on servers – use the clients web browser!
• Drag and Drop capability.  If you’ve ever created a website that had users uploading files we know this is a HUGE feature!  Gmail attachments will be so much easier now too!
• Cross Document Messaging – not too much discussion on this one – are two pages going to be communicate with each other?
• Timed media playback.
• Video tag allows in browser playback – cool in theory but they dropped a specific codec, so now this is going to get messy!  Users will need to have codec’s installed or users uploading will need to take care!

These are the highlights.  In my opinion the drag and drop is by far going to be the most anticipated and highly used feature – next to video.  But regular end users won’t notice the video tag as they are use to flash.  So many users won’t even notice a difference.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably have about 10 years to go until we’re able to use these features.  Microsoft IE 6 is still lingering around, so we have to wait for that beast to die (2014)…..and with some hope and luck, we’ll be happy coding in html 5 within 10 years!