HTML 5
Hmmm. One of the fun things when a client specifies W3C html compliance as a requirement is that you can spend a surprising amount of time picking just what W3C standard they want you to comply with in the first place. And now it seems that there’ll be another one to choose from. HTML 5 has just been revived as a standard in development, as a reaction to CSS and XHTML. Which means that at some point in the future, you’re going to have CSS 3, XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 out there.
Daniel has a good summary of the whys and what’s involved. Some of the new features look downright spiffy – DOM support improved (right about the time that PHP is pushing away from DOM to get to SimpleXML – doh…), improved support for Forms (native data validation and better native input controls look like good timesavers to me), and more content tags (article, dialog, video, canvas and progress were listed).
As Daniel says though, this is still a standard in draft form; meaning we’re years from mainstream implementation yet. Pity some parts are already out of date so, but then again, I can’t see someone using old hardware thinking too kindly on the idea of upgrading everything because of a new version of software that can probably be abused just as badly as the last few versions to produce whatever the HTML5 version of the blink tag will be.