Thanks to Ben Schwarz the WHATWG now hosts an edition of the HTML standard specifically tailored for web developers: HTML5 for Web Developers. It is identical to the HTML standard, but information specific to implementors and not relevant to web developers has been removed. It also uses some CSS to make it look pretty. We hope you like it!
Much sleep has not been had, so if you read something silly, it might just be me. There’s good news too, Shelley Powers volunteered to start writing the WHATWG Weekly starting March 21. Her main interest is HTML, so you might need to pester her on twitter (@shelleypowers) or email ([email protected]) to get other things covered.
Robert O'Callahan once wrote a great post on The Essence Of Web Applications. Nonetheless, there are some features desktop applications have that would be quite useful in the web application space. The Web Notifications work is one part of that puzzle, bringing an API to the web to show simple application status messages to the user. This way e.g. Yahoo! Mail can notify you of incoming email even when your browser is running in the background or Yahoo! Mail is not the active tab.
Per a decision of the W3C HTML WG the up, last, index, first, and their synonym link relationships (values for the rel attribute) have been dropped. Since archives was similar to index that has been removed too for consistency. These relationships were never that useful to begin with so I suppose it is nice that authors no longer have to worry about them. I.e. either worry whether to add them at all or whether they would be appropriate in a certain situation.
<canvas> for images with structured fallback.