Div Element

Header, footer, nav, aside, article and section are new elements that will replace div.  The complexities of div have paved way for these elements.  Instead of having so many div tags inside the code, HTML 5 gives the capability to use separate element for each purpose.  During modifications, identifying a particular portion thus becomes easy. These two snapshots will give an idea of how the simplification is going to work.

Audio Video Elements

Recently, audio and video have mass migrated to Internet.  HTML 5 provides the ability to treat audio and video as web pages without the need for plug-ins to play them. That is, audio and video will be natively supported by the HTML 5 compliant browsers.  The debate on whether to use a standard format or to support all formats is still on.  These elements are expected to contain textual content for every video, audio brought in the web page.  Such a provision will enable information to be conveyed through non-supportive browsers.  Internet users with debilities will also have the accessibility to web content.  Here is a lookup.

<audio src=”Martinluther.mp3″>

<p>I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.</p>

…</audio>

Few More Elements

Time element will help browsers,  search engines and web crawlers identify time from web pages.  Images are brought through the figure element.  Captions of the image are always associated with the image.  This will allow the user agents to understand more about the image.  Dialog is a another new element and it comes up with 2 sub tags: dt, dd.  dt will indicate the speaker and dd will indicate the dialog.  Here is an example:

<dialog>

<dt>Fay</dt>

<dd>Jerry, could you show me how to hold the racket?</dd>

<dt>Jerry</dt>

<dd>Sure Fay, it’s just like shaking hands. Hold your hand out as though you were going to shake my hand… </dd>

<dt>Fay</dt>

<dd>Do you mean like this?</dd>

<dt>Jerry</dt>

<dd>Right, like that. Then put the racket in your hand, like this. </dd>

</dialog>

There is more in HTML 5.  Seeing by the way developers are contributing to its specification, we can sure expect fascinating behaviors in web pages soon. Most importantly, you can contribute too. Here’s how:

Subscribe to the WhatWG mailing list: http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list

Participate in discussions: http://forums.whatwg.org/

Comment and post blogs: http://blog.whatwg.org/

Links to articles on HTML 5:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/How_HTML_5_Is_Already_Changing_the_Web

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for developing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) documents. The first version, WCAG 1.0, was published in May 1999. The latest WCAG 2.0 was released on 11^th December 2008. The primary intent to publish these documents was to make web content easily accessible to everyone irrespective of any disabilities. WCAG 2.0 is designed in such a way that it is simpler and easier to understand for the web developer community. The document is built on four foundational principles. Then, there are few guidelines provided under each principle. Each guideline is challenged by different testable success criteria. Satisfaction of all these criteria will make the web site conform to WCAG. Let us go through the four principles in brief.

Perceivable

The first principle implies that any content that is displayed on the website must be perceivable. The dictionary meaning of the word perceivable means ‘To achieve understanding of’, ‘To become aware of directly through any of the senses, especially sight or hearing’. In our context, it means that anyone who accesses the web for content should be able to apprehend the information that is presented.

There are four guidelines furnished to illustrate this principle. The first two coerce to provide text alternatives for non-text content and time-based media. This would enable the user to enlarge or render in whatever tactile form as needed. The third guideline focuses on the structure and presentation of the content. A simple design that complies to the standards will reduce the complexities when there is a requirement to extract content and present to debile users. Sometimes distinguishing foreground information from background can become difficult. The fourth guideline helps avoid this conflict and focuses on making information distinguishable. Success criteria are determined on color, contrast, background audio, text images and many more.

Operable

The second principle deals with the operability of the user interface components. Users can come across situations where they are not able to interact with the content due to issues in links, user controls and other navigation.

The first guideline under this principle recommends making all the functionality of the content available from a keyboard. This does not outweigh the use of mouse and other interfaces. On the contrary, it means that complete dependence on these devices must be forgone. The guideline also cautions of keyboard traps and advices methods to keep the user away from them. The other guidelines focus on ensuring that the users will be able to complete the tasks required by the content with their own individual response times. For every time limit automatically set by the content, it requires the user to have options to turn it off, adjust and also extend the limit. They also caution the design about seizures mainly occurring due to excessive use of Flash. The last guideline recommends helping the users in their navigation to find content. There are 10 success criteria listed to check whether a user is properly guided.

Understandable

Understandability is the next issue the document addresses. The principle mainly targets the people in the lower part of the intellectual group. It compels the developer to make the content easily available in predictable ways and also help the user avoid and correct mistakes.

The first guideline stresses on making the content readable and understandable. Success criteria are set on languages, abbreviations and pronunciations. It also speaks about restricting unusual words or phrases including idioms and jargon. The other guidelines show light on making the pages predictable and providing assistance to the user in mistake-prone sections. Using instructional labels and help pages can assist the user in different areas.  Detecting errors and reporting immediately, as and when the user is inputting information is also a better method of assistance. These together form the success criteria for this principle.

Robust

The last principle is the most important of all the four. It checks the robustness of the content. Accessibility by user agents is checked here. There is only one guideline and it speaks about the compatibility of the content with the current and future technologies. Avoiding deprecated features of W3C technologies makes the site more compatible. Success criteria are designed for custom user interfaces to check compatibility.

Adhere to the guidelines suggested in WCAG 2.0 will bring in more traffic. Therefore it is essential from the developers’ point of view to know these standards and make them a part of our work.

Link for further study:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/