New HTML 5.1 working draft released

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has presented a new working draft for the HTML markup language; version 5.1 of the markup language is currently being developed. A draft of a second document describes the differences between the current state of development and the previous major version, HTML 4. This second draft lists all details that affect HTML5, or its HTML 5.1 update, compared to HTML4 in chronological order.

More than 40 modifications are listed for the time between September 2012 and 6 May 2013. The changes concern element and attribute implementation details. For example, the W3C has discarded the hgroup element, the img element now supports "progress events" (for measuring event progress), and the time element's datetime attribute must now be spelled as dateTime in the DOM IDL. At the end of May, the W3C also released the new working draft for Level 2 of the canvas element's 2D context.

The consortium has also made available three documents for historical purposes. These documents have either been discontinued – HTML5: Edition for Web Authors and HTML: The Markup Language (an HTML language reference) – or integrated into the HTML5 specification (main element - an HTML5 extension specification).

Back in July 2012, the W3C and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) had finalised their joint development of the standard, and in December 2012, the W3C had declared HTML5 as "finished" and released a first "nightly" draft of the new version. The W3C plans to release the completed HTML5 standard as a recommendation in 2014.

(fab)