HTML 5 vs HTML 4

I was perusing the HTML 5 Spec and I ran across the HTML 5 differences from HTML 4.

There are a couple things that caught my eye immediately: new input types, datagrid, datalist, and also how the structure of the div element has changed. The thing that really sparked my interest was the input types.

HTML 5 is proposing that we have the following new input types:

• datetime
• datetime-local
• date
• month
• week
• time
• number
• range
• email
• url

In short, the user agent (in this case, the browser) will be responsible for providing the interface to which we can use the said input types. Therefore Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Safari, etc will be responsible for rendering the UI for the input type that you choose.

Say wha?!? Yeah, finally, no more writing ajax controls for basic UI, and hopefully there is some type of validation built into the spec (but I haven’t gotten that far into reading it).

Links for ya’ll:

HTML 5 Spec

HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4