The online world is currently atwitter (no social media pun intended) about HTML 5, and how quickly we as web developers can adopt this 'new' mark-up language as our formatting default. But just how much excitement should this really merit?

I've used XHTML 1.1 transitional for the last 4 years, and for good reason. Mostly, I enjoy the consistency of it. Everything lowercase, all attributes within quotes, all tags must have an end. The XML-rigidity of it is extremely appealing to me, and also makes it more readable when it comes to making amends or working within a team.

HTML 5 doesn't inherit this rigidity – any case is allowed, attributes not required to be in quotes and tags don't require an ending. I'm not so sure about this, it could quite easily lead to messy code and inconsistent standards, especially with new coders, and I don't think this is a good thing – surely, code consistency is best practise.

This personal gripe can be solved, however, by serving HTML 5 with an XML MIME type, thereby turning it into XHTML 5. This way, all the new elements and features of HTML 5 can be used whilst maintaining the strict coding standards I so enjoy.

Here are some features I'm really looking forward to using:

• Wrapping the a tag around any element, including block elements such as div – Up until now, this could only be done using a javascript fix.
• HTML 5 video – clearly the most talked about HTML 5 element is video, for good reason. Video on the web currently relies on plugins being installed within the browser such as Adobe Flash, or Microsoft Silverlight. With HTML 5, video playback is native within the browser, requiring no plugins or javascript integration. This also opens up the video element for CSS manipulation for things like opacity, overlapping and rotation (with CSS 3). Annoyingly, a codec squabble is preventing consistent cross-browser operability at present.
• Improved web forms – the text field has been revised, and HTML 5 now recognises input type="email", "tel", "url", etc, as well as returning validation through 'The constraint validation API'.

There are of course many more features, these are just some of the things that I can see will immediately improve my day-to-day life.

To find out more about HTML 5, visit whatwg.org

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