web standards · Grey Nicholson

New Elements in HTML 5

2008-04-01T11:56:00+00:00

HTML 5 has been in development for a good few years now. In addition to clarifying a lot of grey areas in previous versions of the spec, and changing a few definitions to reflect real-world use, it also introduces a few new elements. Here's a quick look at some of the more interesting ones.

The `í` element

HTML 5 redefines the i element, which was purely presentational and denoted anything that looked vaguely slanty, as representing a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized.

Note typical: the contents of an i element don't actually have to be displayed in italics.

In light of this, the spec also introduces the í element (note the acute accent), which represents a really, really italic bit of text; it adds that user agents should render text within an í element with a dynamic ‘whoosh!’ effect.

The `spam` element

HTML 4 introduced the span element, which represents a generic run of text. It's used all over the place in HTML, as a semantically correct way to mark up absolutely anything just for fun.

HTML 5 corrects a typo in the HTML 4 spec and renames this element to spam.

Opera + XSL = Eugh

2004-04-23T14:16:00+00:00

Evidently Opera doesn't like XSL - this weblog shows up as a lot of plain text with the odd URL chucked in. The question is whether I care.

The Twaddle is more of a public offering than this weblog, so it matters a little more if it's inaccessible using Opera... but then how many readers of The Twaddle use Opera? I'd say few to none. (Checking the site stats for The Twaddle will probably show a few Opera hits - most of which are me).

IE + XML + XSL + XHTML + W3C = Get In!

2004-04-23T14:07:00+00:00

As a prelude to some major back-end renovation I'm planning for The Twaddle, I decided to see if I could get Internet Explorer 6 to display this XSL-ified weblog nicely, not accounting for IE-unsupported CSS (which is already taken care of at The Twaddle). Previously, IE displayed the DOCTYPE declaration as plain text at the top of the page; using strategic HTML commenting, I've managed to prevent it from doing so.

Actually, I bet simply removing the DOCTYPE declaration wouldn't affect either Gecko or IE's rendering of the page, as I think XML kicks both of them into standards mode anyway.

The next step is to try this with some of The Twaddle. And I'd probably best check Opera's effort, too.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types

2004-02-19T15:30:00+00:00

Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for “webmasters” who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename “extensions” to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types.

A few months ago, I asked them if they could serve .xhtml files as XHTML rather than plain text. They responded by saying they wanted to comply with web standards; could I please send them the reference to the W3C recommendation. Great! ...except that nothing's happened since (or at least they haven't told me about it if anything has) - a couple of weeks ago I checked and .xhtml files were still being served as plain text.

I'd appeal to Freewebs now, except I suspect they use Internet Explorer, and thus won't be able to read this...