Abstract
This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core
language of the World Wide Web, HTML.
Web: the Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help
Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on
research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention
has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user
agents in an effort to improve interoperability.
Status of this document
This section describes the status of this document at the
time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this
document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest most recently
formally published revision of this technical report can be
found in the W3C technical reports
index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please
send them to public-html-comments@w3.org
( subscribe
, archives
). All feedback is welcome.
Implementors should be aware that this specification is not
stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the
discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from
under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in
implementing this specification before it eventually reaches the
Candidate Recommendation stage should join the aforementioned
mailing lists and take part in the discussions.
The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working
Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML
working group endorse the contents of the specification. Indeed,
for any section of the specification, one can usually find many
members of the working group or of the W3C as a whole who object
strongly to the current text, the existence of the section at all,
or the idea that the working group should even spend time
discussing the concept of that section.
The changes made to this draft
specification after the 22 January 2008 First Public Working Draft
and this 10 June 2008 Working Draft are recorded in the following
documents:
The following document is also available;
it describes the differences between HTML 5 and the previous major
version of the language, HTML 4:
The W3C HTML Working Group is the W3C
working group responsible for this specification's progress along
the W3C Recommendation track. This specification is the 22 January 10 June
2008 First Public Working Draft.
This document was produced by a group operating under the
5
February 2004 W3C Patent Policy . W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in
connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also
includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who
has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes
contains
Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance
with
section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy .
Stability
Different parts of this specification are at different levels of
maturity.
Some of the more major known issues are marked
like this. There are many other issues that have been raised as
well; the issues given in this document are not the only known
issues! There are also some spec-wide issues that have not yet been
addressed: case-sensitivity is a very poorly handled topic right
now, and the firing of events needs to be unified (right now some
bubble, some don't, they all use different text to fire events,
etc). It would also be nice to unify the rules on downloading
content when attributes change (e.g. src
attributes) - should they initiate downloads when the element
immediately, is inserted in the document, when active scripts end,
etc. This matters e.g. if an attribute is set twice in a row (does
it hit the network twice).
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