A while ago, Jacob Gube wrote a guest post at RWW about 5 exciting things to look forward to in HTML 5. These are:

• New "semantic" HTML elements, e.g <nav>, <article>, <header> and <footer>. This would make it unnecessary to use the generic <div> element, together with class or id attributes, to build common parts of a web page. It would also facilitate search engines to better understand the contents of a web page, e.g. which parts are more relevant.
• Improved forms handling with validation.
• APIs for <video> and <audio> elements, allowing playback, for example. In November last year I wrote about the open source Ogg Theora video codec, which is a good choice for the <video> element.
• The <canvas> element for drawing to the screen.
• User editing of web pages (wiki-style) via the contenteditable attribute.

All details can be found in the latest HTML 5 draft recommendation (currently as of January 24th, 2009). 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Semantics in HTML 5

• Stack Overflow launches, a Q&A site for programmers, who can ask questions and get answers from other programmers. The site is community driven, good answers get voted up and rise in the list of answers to a question. As a result, any discussions among the answers are discouraged, as these will be scrambled, explains Joel Spolsky, one of the founders. Community members can build a reputation by earning points and badges in response to good answers and other activity. Marshall Kirkpatrick liked Stack Overflow in his review, and I think it could be a useful service. Marshall requested subscribable feeds for answers to a question. I found a link to an Atom feed for each question, not sure if it is optimal though. There are also feeds for a users top answers and questions, and the top 30 questions for a specific tag. A chronological feed with all questions belonging to a tag would perhaps be more useful.
  Tags: programming, web development
• Webmonkey has an article about HTML 5, the next specification in works for the HTML language. The latest specification 4.01 was completed in 1999, and we probably will have to wait at least another 10 years for a completed version 5. In the meantime some browser vendors have implemented parts of the HTML 5 draft, e.g. the canvas element, and more recently the video element, as I wrote about last week. Browser extensions like Gears, and plugins like Silverlight and Flash also find a niche, where the current standard is lagging behind.
  Tags: HTML5, web standards
• Scott Hanselman writes about the use of multiple processes in the Chrome browser and in IE8. Separate processes create a greater degree of isolation between tabs: If one process/tab crashes, the other processes/tabs stay unaffected. The potential overhead of processes vs. threads, and the inter-communication between processes, are really no problem nowadays considering the rapid development of computer hardware.
  Tags: Chrome, IE8
• A new tool dubbed CookieMonster will soon be released to the public. It is able to get hold of user credentials submitted to secured sites via a man-in-the-middle attack. Several banks are identified as insecure. The tool utilizes a programming flaw, where the website developer has failed to designate the authentication cookie as secure.
  Tags: security
• Atmosphir, a 3D platform game creation tool, is currently in private beta but expects to open to the public at the end of the year. Atmosphir got one of the five jury selection prices at this years TechChrunch50. Hopefully it is fun for creative kids.
  
  Tags: gaming

Important new features proposed for ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2.0) were support for classes (object-oriented programming), packages, namespaces, type annotations and static typing. Packages and namespaces have been dropped from the Harmony project, classes will remain in some form but the status for type annotations is yet unclear.

ECMAScript (JavaScript) is an open language, supported natively in some dialect by most browsers. It propels many Web 2.0 sites, enabling features like AJAX for example. JavaScript and HTML form the basis of standards based client-side Web programming, and is generally preferred over proprietary technologies like Flash (Adobe) and Silverlight (Microsoft).

The scripting language ActionScript (specifically version 3.0), which is used in Adobe Flash, is based on an early proposal for ECMAScript 4, which kind of gives Adobe a break. However, the script is compiled to bytecode before running on the client, and a separate runtime component (e.g. Flash Player) is required. It can be expected that ActionScript is adapted to comply with future versions of ECMAScript, possibly keeping some additional features.

The latest stable edition of ECMAScript is 3 (from Dec 1999), which roughly corresponds to JavaScript 1.5, JScript 5 and ActionScript 1.0.