Drupal makes HTML in hundreds of separate little places. And right now, we're been fairly happy with the HTML it makes. It's got lots of divs in it, but it's clean, it works, it's standards-based. But HTML5 is about to change that.

HTML5 is about to take off, and designers, developers and clients who use Drupal are going to want to use it. Overriding hundreds of separate bits of HTML with theming functions is a laborious and overwhelming task.

How can we do this better? How might we change Drupal so that altering the markup is easier, and so that Drupal can rock HTML5?

For More Info

• http://groups.drupal.org/html5
• http://groups.drupal.org/node/82664
• HTML Tools: http://drupal.org/project/html5_tools
• Elements: http://drupal.org/project/elements
• HTML Base: http://drupal.org/project/html5_base

A Note Afterwards

At the beginning of this video, I said something like "Drupal is not only assuming you want a web page, it's assuming you want a XML page… and what if you don't want an XML page because you've decided XML sucks, and you want HTML5." What I meant to say was XHTML (not XML, duh!) — and what I specifically meant by that is XHTML 1.1 Strict.

To me, XHTML (1.0 Transitional and later 1.1 Strict) was the replacement for HTML 4. While, yes, technically the XHTML spec added no new features beyond HTML 4, browsers behave so entirely different when interpreting the XHTML doctype instead of the HTML 4 doctype (or lack of doctype) — especially in how they handle the CSS that goes with the HTML — that it's an entirely different thing. You cannot build the same kind of website in HTML 4 that you can in XHTML 1.1 Strict. I haven't written HTML 4 in almost a decade. I write XHTML everyday. Every front-end developer I know thinks about XHTML as the replacement for HTML 4. (And btw, now that I look it up, so does wikipedia: "XHTML is a separate language that began as a reformulation of HTML 4.01 using XML 1.0." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML)

Apparently, however, many Drupal core developers have a different perspective. They think we are all writing HTML 4 these days, and think of XHTML simply as any version of HTML + XML markup. They did not understand why I was talking about replacing XHTML. And they assumed I was saying we should stop using XML-like formatting in our HTML. I was not.

If you are a person who thinks of HTML4 as the current version of HTML, then just pretend you hear "HTML 4" everywhere that I said "XHTML" (or in error, "XML" in the first few sentences.) Next time I talk about this, I will definitely start with a history lesson on the evolution on HTML so we can all be on the same page.