In Tim Berners-Lee’s Blog entry, Reinventing HTML, It seems W3C failed to implement the new XHTML standard amongst the developers. Thanks to all easy-go browsers, which will not validate tags, attributes, etc…

456bereastreet.com suggests some of the changes required in the new HTML version, I’d say version 5.0. Some of the points mentioned are.

• New attributes that will make forms easier to validate: required for input, textarea, and select elements, maxlength for textarea elements.
• The reappearance of the start and value attributes for ol and li elements respectively.
• Stricter, XHTML-like syntax: make lowercase required for all element and attribute names, make quoted attribute values required, require all end tags that are currently optional.

Changes required for HTML v 5.0

• Browsers shouldn’t render anything if there is any major error in Document, or atleast give a warning
• Direct Form validation support: no need of Javascript for trivial validations
• A “TABLE” like tag that works as well as “TABLE” for layout and positioning, Developers are sick of making CSS work for all browsers

Many a times, on your page, you need to have a JavaScript pop-up window for Slideshow, gallery, comment form, etc. But you also want to have your site WAI compatible. What do you do ?

The idea is to pop-up windows in Browsers that support JavaScript and provide actual href value to the Anchor tag a. But also provide an onclick event that pops up the window.

Consider I want to have a slideshow on a particular link, which actually should pop a 500 x 400 window keeping WAI in its place. This is the code that helps me solve the problem.

Code

...
<script type="text/javascript">
function popW(url) {
  window.open(url, 'newPop', 'width=500,height:400, directories=0');
}
</script>
...
<a href="/slide-show.html" onclick="popW('/slide-show.html');return false;">Slideshow</a>
..

Let us understand it..

• The Slideshow page is spearate document/page
• The anchor’ href attribute specifies the correct link to the page
• The onclick handler pops the window, in browsers with JavaScript enabled
• Notice return false; after the function call in onclick. This prevents JavaScript enabled browsers to load the href link on the current page