When you think back to the days when HTML 5 was the exciting new technology that was going to save us all, it is something of a shock to realize that HTML 5.1 slips in almost unnoticed as an official web standard on 1st November.
The heat has gone out of the HTML revolution and now all we have are incremental changes to the core markup. Most of the interesting things are going on outside of HTML in the form of new web technologies. When you think about it then it is a mystery why we got so excited about a markup language at all. There were some key new features in HTML 5, like Canvas and the ability to play videos and sound media, but overall HTML 5 was a bit of a yawn. So it is with HTML 5.1.
The new features are:
The picture andsrcset attributes allow responsive image selection.
The details andsummary elements enable authors to provide extended information that users can choose whether to read.
The menuitem and type="context" attribute value enable authors to add functionality to the browser’s context menu.
The requestAnimationFrame API allows for more efficient animation.
enqueueJob and nextJob help explain Promise resolution in terms of microtasks.
The rev attribute for links, primarily to support RDFa (previously defined in HTML 4).
HTMLMediaElement and srcObject objects.
Enable cross-origin track and EventSource and cross-origin content for ImageBitmap in canvas.
event-source-error, event-track-error and event-track-load events for media fetching.
onrejectionhandled and onunhandledrejection and APIs for tracking promise rejection.
HTMLTableCaptionElement, HTMLTableSectionElement, HTMLTableRowElement, for HTML table elements.
history.scrollRestoration to control where a users' view is directed when navigating through their history.
IDL [SameObject], for some objects that return collections.
Add "noopener" to rel and window to allow for browsing contexts to be separated.
nonce attribute on script and style to support the use of Content Security Policy.
All we have to do now is wait for the browser makers to update the rendering engines. Look out for HTML 5.2 at the end of next year.
Matt Pidden, a computer science student at the University of Bristol, UK, has broken the world record for solving a 4x4 Rubik's Cube using a robot he designed, built and trained in just 15 weeks.
