HTML 5 is planned to be the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features are introduced to help web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. It is an incremental step forward rather than a bold step as compared with XHTML 2.0 that is coming and which is intended to create an architecture that will become the host language to many other W3C technologies. The ideas behind HTML 5 were pioneered in 2004 by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). HTML 5 was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the W3C in 2007. The HTML working group has published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22nd January 2008. HTML 5 should be flexible to handle incorrect syntax in contract to XHTML where the browser must refuse to render the page at all even if there is just one illegal character or missing close tag. HTML 5 is designed such that the old HTML 4 browsers will escape the new HTML 5 tags or constructs.

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