intertwingly

Lachlan Hunt: HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics

Excellent Overview.  I’ll note that the page itself contains <div id="sidebar" class="column"> and other HTML4-isms.  But it doesn’t advertise to be HTML5, it claims to be XHTML1-Transitional, served as text/html.  It is both valid and works.

But in the interest of getting practical deployment experience with these specifications, I plan to explore exploiting these new tags on both my weblog and my planet.  Two issues immediately come to mind, and I’m sure I’ll encounter more.

• Regarding the structure elements, my understanding is that it is not possible to associate CSS styles to such using IE6 or IE7.  For this reason, it appears to me that many who wish to make use of these additional elements will find it necessary to include the original elements too.  I’ll see how long I can go without finding the need to do this.
• The video element will prove handy on planets, as the Universal Feed Parser will strip both object and embed tags, but since mid April, the nightlies will allow video elements to pass through.  One thing worth exploring is the conversion of selected usages of the embed element to video (or audio) elements.  Of course, that begs the question: if there is an automated way of determining whether the markup is safe, why can’t the original embed element simply be allowed through?  And for browsers that don’t yet support video elements, wouldn’t including the embed element as a fall back be a prudent thing to do?  Or am I missing something?  For example, does embed do content sniffing where as video is guaranteed to never override the MIME type?

Please leave any markup suggestions you may have in the comments.