HTML 5 and Web Standards

With the recent publishing of the W3C HTML 5 Working Draft, and the debacle which is IE versioning through meta tags, I have been having some thoughts about web standards.

It so happens that I am not the only one! Molly E. Holzschlag has also been thinking. Whilst her thoughts are somewhat more drastic than mine, I felt it time to put forward my thoughts on the next generation of HTML on the web.

HTML 5 is a massive specification introducing many new tags and attributes of which without a doubt my favourite is the irrelevant attribute. I would personally be quite happy to wrap large parts of the spec in such a tag!

I believe strongly in simplification and I do not believe HTML 5 simplifies HTML. What I think we need is less not more. There is one very specific point which grates. HTML should enforce an XML syntax - tags should have to be closed and have to be well formed. HTML 5 allows unclosed tags and this to my mind is a step backwards. Indeed, I see the spec contains code a bit like this:

<dl>

<dt>Radius: <dd> <meter min=0 max=20 value=12>12cm</meter>

<dt>Height: <dd> <meter min=0 max=10 value=2>2cm</meter>

</dl>

This is some ugly stuff!

I believe HTML 5 should actually be XHTML 5 (or version 2 or whatever version you like!). It should contain a small set of semantic tags including paragraph, emphasis, lists, audio, video, anchors, images, divisions (or sections) amongst others, creating a small set of recognised tags with well defined default rendering for each. As an author, I should be allowed to create ANY OTHER TAG I LIKE as long as it is well formed XML. The default rendering for each unrecognised tag should be as an inline element and they should offer no semantic meaning.

The tags I "create" should be able to be styled through CSS and accessible as DOM nodes via JavaScript.

Its simple. Or is it too simple?