HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

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Chris Missal, June 10, 2008

The working group for HTML 5 has just released the HTML 5 differences from HTML 4... I'm excited. Most notably the "Absent Elements" (3.4) section. Removed are 8 presentation elements and 3 elements that negatively affect accessibility. I'm sure many will see this as a bad thing, but HTML was designed to be used as meta-data structure or markup (the ML portion of HTML), not presentation structure.

I think what I like most about this is that is one step further for the promotion of CSS to be used solely for presentation, layout and design. You'll see a bigger list of "Absent Attributes" than you will elements. Again, this is because CSS was designed to handle things like alignment, backgrounds, borders, spacing, padding, height, margins, size, width, and so on.

You may also see when scanning over this document that it is recommended to leave out the name attribute and use the id attribute instead. I like this, since I've probably used JavaScript function getElementById() way more than I have ever used any other JavaScript function period.

I'm sure this brief note was either beating a dead horse, preaching to the crowd, or completely ignored. I do, however, feel it is worth getting excited about if you're a fan of the web.

Filed Under: HTML JavaScript