Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey's Michael Calore.

According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the <video> tag, but doesn't specify which codec to use.

Transition from Plugins

Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don't like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because "if you can't see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You're missing a lot." Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video.

For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can't talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site.

What About Microsoft?

At today's PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn't say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft candidly acknowledged that it has to improve JavaScript performance as well. After only a few weeks of development on IE9, the company is already matching the performance of the latest beta versions of Firefox and Chrome.

If you want to learn more about HTML5, also have a look at this story: 5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML5.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.

Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product was launched this year called Wolfram|Alpha, described as a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and its key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars?' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put up the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say that my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.

Pachube, an example of the Internet of Things (see ReadWriteWeb profile)

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allow you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

RWW: The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make their data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted, in Part 1 of our interview, that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how organizations can contribute their data.

This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.¹

Note: the interview will be published in two parts, with Part 1 today on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 will explore other topics and will run tomorrow.

UPDATE: Part 2 of this interview is now available.

How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots

RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web?

TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the semantic web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed.

Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community.

The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely.

Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia.³ That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea.

Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009

Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.

Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data.

In Part 2 of this interview we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web. Read Part 2 here.

Footnotes:

1. The very first sentence written on this blog, on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it."

2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor.

3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources.

According to W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, mobileOK checker builds on the suite of quality assurance tools already offered by W3C and "does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time."

From there, the working group determined which tests could be automated and the mobileOK checker was created.

Some of the recommendations offered by the mobileOK checker include:

• XHTML Basic 1.1. for markup format
• Images should be small, either GIF or JPEG, and have alt attributes
• Remove whitespaces and comments by adding a cleaning step in the publication process (e.g. through tidy)
• Keep page size under 20 KB, and the markup under 10 KB to ensure timeliness of retrieval and rendering by mobile devices
• If you use scripts, ensure scripting support is not required
• Don't use frames, pop-ups or applets
• Formats that require plugins are likely to break on mobile devices.

While the W3C points out that being mobileOK is not a guarantee that a Web document will be rendered correctly across all mobile devices or that user experience is a certainty, it is definitely a good place to start if you want recommendations on how to make your site more mobile friendly.

Flipcards

Other useful resources from the W3C include the Mobile Web Best Practices Flipcards that summarize the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 document. A PDF version of the cards is offered, and they are available in French, German, Korean and Spanish.

HTML 5 aims to improve HTML's interoperability and address the growing demand for more diverse and complex web content. It also addresses HTML 4's lacking features for web applications. In this post, we'll look at 5 exciting new features in HTML 5.

A bit of history

The conceptual thinking for HTML 5 began in late 2003. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that oversees the web's standard protocols and guidelines, expressed interest in the HTML 5 draft originally developed by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a group formed in 2004 consisting of representatives of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software. As a result, the W3C HTML Working Group was formed in 2007 to develop the specifications of HTML 5.

Development is underway, and HTML 5 is anticipated to reach W3C Candidate Recommendation status in 2012, though many modern browsers already have partial support for HTML 5 specifications.

Exciting new features

1. New HTML elements that improve our ability to describe content

HTML's primary task is to describe the structure of a web page. For example, by enclosing text between <p></p> elements, HTML tells the browser that the text between those elements is a paragraph.

Increasingly, diverse web content has outgrown HTML 4's ability to accurately describe the content of a web page. Streaming video and audio is now commonplace. Website regions such as navigation menus and branding areas (commonly located in the header) are now staples of most web pages. More importantly, advancements in JavaScript, Flash, and server-side technologies have allowed for the proliferation of rich Internet applications (responsive, user-driven, browser-based applications), despite current HTML specifications.

By adding more HTML elements, HTML 5 aims to give developers a better and more precise way of describing data.

For example, under current HTML specifications, this is how we would describe the structure of a typical web page:

The problem with this layout is that, to the browser, everything is a <div> element. The browser treats everything inside the <div> elements equally because it can't tell the difference between them, and "classes" and "ids," such as content, sidebar, and footer, change from website to website.

In HTML 5, this is how you might describe the layout of the same web page:

In this markup, the browser now knows what each part is. It knows that the web page's main content is inside the <article> element, that the website's navigation is inside the <nav> element, and so on.

Besides prettier-looking and more semantic markup, the practical implications are endless. It increases our markup's interoperability. For example, an external system, such as a search engine spider, would be able to more accurately determine what content on a web page is important. It can skip crawling the <nav> element and the <footer> element because they probably do not contain the main content of the web page. A well-formed HTML 5 document would therefore give search engines a better understanding of the content being displayed.

A crafty developer could create an application that pulls out just the <article> section of a group of websites, say, to aggregate it in a database, or generate a list of all the videos on a web page by finding all the <video> elements.

Screen-reading software could give vision-impaired users a quicker way to traverse content sections. They could go to the <article> element directly if they wanted to read the main content of the web page, or go directly to the <nav> element if they wanted to navigate away from the page.

2. Improved web forms handling

These days, it's hard not to come across forms on websites. You encounter them when submitting a comment on a blog, registering for a user account, or sendinging mail in Gmail. HTML 5's proposed specifications include a huge revamping, called Web Forms 2.0, of how web forms would be handled. It gives web developers a lot of options and new features for effectively and easily handling input fields and form submissions.

The most exciting thing about Web Forms 2.0 is form validation. Currently, developers are required to use JavaScript (client-side) or PHP (server-side) code to validate inputs. For example, many web forms contain required fields (perhaps for the username and email fields):

In HTML 4, the markup of the web form above would look something like:

Currently, you have to use scripting to validate a user's submission. In this example, developers would have to write their own validation code (or use a pre-made script, such as this one) to ensure that required fields aren't left blank by accident or that submitted email addresses are valid (usually by doing something called "regular expression" matching).

In handling this form without requiring the author to include a validation script, HTML 5 (with the current Web 2.0 specifications) would give us additional element attributes, such as required and email attributes, which automatically check that the username and email fields are not left blank and that the email address' format is valid.

3. APIs for easier web application development

HTML 5 will introduce several application programming interfaces (APIs) to new and existing elements, aimed at improving web application development and addressing current issues with HTML 4's lack of ability to allow developers to mark up web applications.

One API is specifically for working with audio and video and will be used with the <audio> and <video> elements. It will provide audio and video playback capabilities and eliminate the need to use third-party applications, such as Flash, to develop and display media (at least for supported media files).

Check out this scripted video controls demonstration, which accompanies this Opera Developer Community article on the video element.

4. The <canvas> element allows image scripting on the fly

Most people take in information more quickly and effectively through visuals. For example, between a table, numerical data, and a pie chart, the pie chart gives users a better feel for the scale and relationship of data (at least most of the time).

The downside of images is that they're static. If you create a pie chart using a traditional method (for example, with an image editor like Photoshop, or a graphing application like Excel), you wouldn't be able to adjust any data that changes without manually editing your graphics.

With the <canvas> element, you can take constantly changing (database-driven) data and apply it to a pie chart like the one above, as well as other types of 2D visuals (even a cat, if you're so inclined), via scripting.

The canvas API also allows users to interact with <canvas> elements. For example, you can write a script that responds to users' clicking on a particular section of the pie chart.

5. Users can edit and interact with sections of a web page

The section in the proposed HTML 5 specifications about User Interaction describes new ways of marking up interactive web pages. The contenteditable attribute (a boolean attribute to which you assign either true or false) allows you to indicate which parts of a web page users can change.

This can be useful for wiki-style websites, in which content is user-generated. Another use of the contenteditable attribute would be to create web page templates. You can allow certain regions of a web page to be open to content editing and lock other regions that shouldn't be changed. This gives users of your website who aren't proficient in HTML an opportunity to input content safely without affecting critical areas that should be handled by more knowledgeable users.

At the document level, you can make an entire page editable via the designMode attribute, which accepts two values: on or off.

In Sum

The proposed specifications are slated to reach W3C Candidate Recommendation status in 2012, but that doesn't mean you have to wait that long to start using some of the new things in HTML 5. A lot of modern browsers, for example, have already implemented the <canvas> element (including Mozilla Firefox, which has partially implemented it since version 1.5).

HTML 5 will redefine how web developers mark up content. It will provide a better way to describe the content displayed on a web page, enable more complex content types, improve media and web application support, and increase the interoperability of HTML documents.

Note that things are still under heavy development and are bound to change; many of the proposed improvements may be heavily revised in the next few years or not implemented at all.

There are a lot of exciting new features in HTML 5. Share your own favorites in the comments.

Further reading

• You can read the latest working draft of HTML 5 specifications on the W3C website.

• Learn about the major differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 on the W3C website.
• IBM developerWorks has an excellent in-depth article on new elements in HTML 5.
• Read about the people in charge of developing HTML 5 specifications on the W3C HTML Working Group website.
• Find out what you can do to help HTML 5 development on the WHATWG wiki website.

About the author

Jacob Gube is a web developer/designer and author of Six Revisions, a blog on web development and design. If you want to connect with the author, you can follow him on Twitter.

"Kingsley, help, they are making our poor semanticshamntic web complicated again.

There should be a license required to write about the two big topics in semantic technologies:

1) The technology behind it - generally recognized as the greatest blunder the W3C has ever made; OWL and RDFS.

2) The effects and resulting applications that will emerge from these technologies, and the competing technologies that leap over the OWL/RDFS abortion. (Computational Linguistics, Machine learning).

If the author is a computer scientist actually working in the field, please accept my apologies, I'm nit here to tear down, but really, all of the tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven'st seen productivity delivered.

And, I have been installing semantic browsers, add-ons, etc., since 2004.

Personally, I believe that the delivery of functions of the semantic whatever, will have to be delivered as fully integrated tools and services.

The man on the street, including some savvy small business folks, are just getting up on web apps as a service, giving up the local server in favor of services, and just getting wrapped around blogs and such as a marketing channel.

Enough on Semantic Punditry - unless you would like to order my report on the semantic web for an introductory price of $895.00, you will need the semantic browser extension to read it, and will then be able to surf contextual links that are related to your email thread and porn chats."