22 January 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first public working draft of the HTML 5.0 specification. The official press release can be found here. Its taken nearly 11 months since work began on HTML 5.0 for this first public working draft to get released. Too slow! No that’s way faster compare to most of the W3C working group’s pace. Slow or fast at least this working draft is the milestone to the bright future ahead, especially future of dynamic web development.

The key purpose of HTML 5.0 is to make it easier for developers to create dynamic content and it introduces tons of new elements to enable this. A final release of HTML 5.0 is still far and far away but off course the future is looking bright.

The key new elements are:

1. section represents a generic document or application section. It can be used together with h1-h6 to indicate the document structure.
2. article represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article.
3. aside represents a piece of content that is only slightly related to the rest of the page.
4. header represents the header of a section.
5. footer represents a footer for a section and can contain information about the author, copyright information, et cetera.
6. nav represents a section of the document intended for navigation.
7. figure can be used to associate a caption together with some embedded content, such as a graphic or video. Almost table like declaration.
8. datagrid represents an interactive representation of a tree list or tabular data.
9. progress represents a completion of a task, such as downloading or when performing a series of expensive operations.

The following elements are not in HTML 5 because the usability and accessibility issues caused by their usage: frame frameset noframes

You can track the full list of changes, omissions and differences of HTML 5 from its predecessor’s right here.