This section is non-normative.
The World Wide Web's markup language has always been HTML. HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents, although its general design and adaptations over the years has enabled it to be used to describe a number of other types of documents.
The main area that has not been adequately addressed by HTML is a vague subject referred to as Web Applications. This specification attempts to rectify this, while at the same time updating the HTML specifications to address issues raised in the past few years.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is limited to providing a semantic-level markup language and associated semantic-level scripting APIs for authoring accessible pages on the Web ranging from static documents to dynamic applications.
The scope of this specification does not include providing mechanisms for media-specific customization of presentation (although default rendering rules for Web browsers are included at the end of this specification, and several mechanisms for hooking into CSS are provided as part of the language).
The scope of this specification does not include documenting every HTML
or DOM feature supported by Web browsers. Browsers support many features
that are considered to be very bad for accessibility or that are otherwise
inappropriate. For example, the blink element is clearly
presentational and authors wishing to cause text to blink should instead
use CSS.
The scope of this specification is not to describe an entire operating system. In particular, hardware configuration software, image manipulation tools, and applications that users would be expected to use with high-end workstations on a daily basis are out of scope. In terms of applications, this specification is targeted specifically at applications that would be expected to be used by users on an occasional basis, or regularly but from disparate locations, with low CPU requirements. For instance online purchasing systems, searching systems, games (especially multiplayer online games), public telephone books or address books, communications software (e-mail clients, instant messaging clients, discussion software), document editing software, etc.
For sophisticated cross-platform applications, there already exist several proprietary solutions (such as Mozilla's XUL, Adobe's Flash, or Microsoft's Silverlight). These solutions are evolving faster than any standards process could follow, and the requirements are evolving even faster. These systems are also significantly more complicated to specify, and are orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve interoperability with, than the solutions described in this document. Platform-specific solutions for such sophisticated applications (for example the MacOS X Core APIs) are even further ahead.
This section is non-normative.
This specification represents a new version of the HTML language, along with a new version of the associated DOM2 HTML API. Migration from HTML4 or XHTML1 to the format and APIs described in this specification should in most cases be straightforward, as care has been taken to ensure that backwards-compatibility is retained.
This specification will eventually supplant Web Forms 2.0 as well. [WF2]
This section is non-normative.
XHTML2 [XHTML2] defines a new HTML vocabulary with better features for hyperlinks, multimedia content, annotating document edits, rich metadata, declarative interactive forms, and describing the semantics of human literary works such as poems and scientific papers.
However, it lacks elements to express the semantics of many of the non-document types of content often seen on the Web. For instance, forum sites, auction sites, search engines, online shops, and the like, do not fit the document metaphor well, and are not covered by XHTML2.
This specification aims to extend HTML so that it is also suitable in these contexts.
XHTML2 and this specification use different namespaces and therefore can both be implemented in the same XML processor.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is independent of the various proprietary UI languages that various vendors provide. As an open, vendor-neutral language, HTML provides for a solution to the same problems without the risk of vendor lock-in.
This section is non-normative.
This specification is divided into the following important sections:
There are also a couple of appendices, defining rendering rules for Web browsers and listing areas that are out of scope for this specification.
This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.
All diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119. For readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification. [RFC2119]
Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("must", "should", "may", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.
This specification describes the conformance criteria for user agents (relevant to implementors) and documents (relevant to authors and authoring tool implementors).
There is no implied relationship between document conformance requirements and implementation conformance requirements. User agents are not free to handle non-conformant documents as they please; the processing model described in this specification applies to implementations regardless of the conformity of the input documents.
User agents fall into several (overlapping) categories with different conformance requirements.
Web browsers that support XHTML must process elements and attributes from the HTML namespace found in XML documents as described in this specification, so that users can interact with them, unless the semantics of those elements have been overridden by other specifications.
A conforming XHTML processor would, upon finding an
XHTML script element in an XML
document, execute the script contained in that element. However, if the
element is found within an XSLT transformation sheet (assuming the UA
also supports XSLT), then the processor would instead treat the script element as an opaque element that
forms part of the transform.
Web browsers that support HTML must
process documents labeled as text/html as described in this
specification, so that users can interact with them.
User agents that process HTML and XHTML documents purely to render non-interactive versions of them must comply to the same conformance criteria as Web browsers, except that they are exempt from requirements regarding user interaction.
Typical examples of non-interactive presentation user agents are printers (static UAs) and overhead displays (dynamic UAs). It is expected that most static non-interactive presentation user agents will also opt to lack scripting support.
A non-interactive but dynamic presentation UA would still execute scripts, allowing forms to be dynamically submitted, and so forth. However, since the concept of "focus" is irrelevant when the user cannot interact with the document, the UA would not need to support any of the focus-related DOM APIs.
Implementations that do not support scripting (or which have their scripting features disabled entirely) are exempt from supporting the events and DOM interfaces mentioned in this specification. For the parts of this specification that are defined in terms of an events model or in terms of the DOM, such user agents must still act as if events and the DOM were supported.
Scripting can form an integral part of an application. Web browsers that do not support scripting, or that have scripting disabled, might be unable to fully convey the author's intent.
Conformance checkers must verify that a document conforms to the
applicable conformance criteria described in this specification.
Automated conformance checkers are exempt from detecting errors that
require interpretation of the author's intent (for example, while a
document is non-conforming if the content of a blockquote element is not a quote,
conformance checkers running without the input of human judgement do not
have to check that blockquote
elements only contain quoted material).
Conformance checkers must check that the input document conforms when parsed without a browsing context (meaning that no scripts are run, and that the parser's scripting flag is disabled), and should also check that the input document conforms when parsed with a browsing context in which scripts execute, and that the scripts never cause non-conforming states to occur other than transiently during script execution itself. (This is only a "SHOULD" and not a "MUST" requirement because it has been proven to be impossible. [HALTINGPROBLEM])
The term "HTML5 validator" can be used to refer to a conformance checker that itself conforms to the applicable requirements of this specification.
XML DTDs cannot express all the conformance requirements of this specification. Therefore, a validating XML processor and a DTD cannot constitute a conformance checker. Also, since neither of the two authoring formats defined in this specification are applications of SGML, a validating SGML system cannot constitute a conformance checker either.
To put it another way, there are three types of conformance criteria:
A conformance checker must check for the first two. A simple DTD-based validator only checks for the first class of errors and is therefore not a conforming conformance checker according to this specification.
Applications and tools that process HTML and XHTML documents for reasons other than to either render the documents or check them for conformance should act in accordance to the semantics of the documents that they process.
A tool that generates document outlines but increases the nesting level for each paragraph and does not increase the nesting level for each section would not be conforming.
Authoring tools and markup generators must generate conforming documents. Conformance criteria that apply to authors also apply to authoring tools, where appropriate.
Authoring tools are exempt from the strict requirements of using elements only for their specified purpose, but only to the extent that authoring tools are not yet able to determine author intent.
For example, it is not conforming to use an address element for arbitrary contact
information; that element can only be used for marking up contact
information for the author of the document or section. However, since an
authoring tool is likely unable to determine the difference, an
authoring tool is exempt from that requirement.
In terms of conformance checking, an editor is therefore required to output documents that conform to the same extent that a conformance checker will verify.
When an authoring tool is used to edit a non-conforming document, it may preserve the conformance errors in sections of the document that were not edited during the editing session (i.e. an editing tool is allowed to round-trip erroneous content). However, an authoring tool must not claim that the output is conformant if errors have been so preserved.
Authoring tools are expected to come in two broad varieties: tools that work from structure or semantic data, and tools that work on a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get media-specific editing basis (WYSIWYG).
The former is the preferred mechanism for tools that author HTML, since the structure in the source information can be used to make informed choices regarding which HTML elements and attributes are most appropriate.
However, WYSIWYG tools are legitimate. WYSIWYG tools should use
elements they know are appropriate, and should not use elements that
they do not know to be appropriate. This might in certain extreme cases
mean limiting the use of flow elements to just a few elements, like
div, b,
i, and span and making liberal use of the style attribute.
All authoring tools, whether WYSIWYG or not, should make a best effort attempt at enabling users to create well-structured, semantically rich, media-independent content.
Some conformance requirements are phrased as requirements on elements, attributes, methods or objects. Such requirements fall into two categories: those describing content model restrictions, and those describing implementation behavior. The former category of requirements are requirements on documents and authoring tools. The second category are requirements on user agents.
Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps may be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent. (In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are intended to be easy to follow, and not intended to be performant.)
User agents may impose implementation-specific limits on otherwise unconstrained inputs, e.g. to prevent denial of service attacks, to guard against running out of memory, or to work around platform-specific limitations.
For compatibility with existing content and prior specifications, this specification describes two authoring formats: one based on XML (referred to as XHTML5), and one using a custom format inspired by SGML (referred to as HTML5). Implementations may support only one of these two formats, although supporting both is encouraged.
Such XML documents may contain a DOCTYPE if desired, but
this is not required to conform to this specification.
According to the XML specification, XML processors are not
guaranteed to process the external DTD subset referenced in the DOCTYPE.
This means, for example, that using entity references for characters in
XHTML documents is unsafe (except for <,
>, &, " and ').
The language in this specification assumes that the user agent expands all entity references, and therefore does not include entity reference nodes in the DOM. If user agents do include entity reference nodes in the DOM, then user agents must handle them as if they were fully expanded when implementing this specification. For example, if a requirement talks about an element's child text nodes, then any text nodes that are children of an entity reference that is a child of that element would be used as well. Entity references to unknown entities must be treated as if they contained just an empty text node for the purposes of the algorithms defined in this specification.
A lot of arrays/lists/collections in this spec assume zero-based indexes but use the term "indexth" liberally. We should define those to be zero-based and be clearer about this.
Unless otherwise specified, if a DOM attribute that is a floating point
number type (float) is assigned an Infinity or
Not-a-Number value, a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR
exception must be raised.
Unless otherwise specified, if a method with an argument that is a
floating point number type (float) is passed an
Infinity or Not-a-Number value, a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception must be raised.
Unless otherwise specified, if a method is passed fewer arguments than
is defined for that method in its IDL definition, a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception must be raised.
Unless otherwise specified, if a method is passed more arguments than is defined for that method in its IDL definition, the excess arguments must be ignored.
This specification relies on several other underlying specifications.
Implementations that support XHTML5 must support some version of XML, as well as its corresponding namespaces specification, because XHTML5 uses an XML serialization with namespaces. [XML] [XMLNAMES]
User agents must follow the rules given by XML Base to resolve relative URIs in HTML and XHTML fragments. That is the mechanism used in this specification for resolving relative URIs in DOM trees. [XMLBASE]
It is possible for xml:base attributes to be present even in
HTML fragments, as such attributes can be added dynamically using
script. (Such scripts would not be conforming, however, as xml:base attributes as
not allowed in HTML documents.)
Implementations must support some version of DOM Core and DOM Events, because this specification is defined in terms of the DOM, and some of the features are defined as extensions to the DOM Core interfaces. [DOM3CORE] [DOM3EVENTS]
Implementations that use ECMAScript to implement the APIs defined in this specification must implement them in a manner consistent with the ECMAScript Bindings defined in the Web IDL specification, as this specification uses that specification's terminology. [WebIDL]
Implementations must support some version of the Media Queries language. However, when applying the rules of the Media Queries specification to media queries found in content attributes of HTML elements, user agents must act as if all U+000B LINE TABULATION characters in the attribute were in fact U+0020 SPACE characters. This is required to provide a consistent processing of space characters in HTML. [MQ]
This specification does not require support of any particular network transport protocols, style sheet language, scripting language, or any of the DOM and WebAPI specifications beyond those described above. However, the language described by this specification is biased towards CSS as the styling language, ECMAScript as the scripting language, and HTTP as the network protocol, and several features assume that those languages and protocols are in use.
This specification might have certain additional requirements on character encodings, image formats, audio formats, and video formats in the respective sections.
Some elements are defined in terms of their DOM textContent attribute. This is an
attribute defined on the Node interface in DOM3 Core. [DOM3CORE]
Should textContent be defined differently for dir="" and <bdo>? Should we come up with an alternative to textContent that handles those and other things, like alt=""?
The interface DOMTimeStamp is
defined in DOM3 Core. [DOM3CORE]
The term activation behavior is used as defined in the DOM3 Events specification. [DOM3EVENTS] At the time of writing, DOM3 Events hadn't yet been updated to define that phrase.
The rules for handling alternative style sheets are defined in the CSS object model specification. [CSSOM]
Certain features are defined in terms of CSS <color> values. When
the CSS value currentColor is specified in this
context, the "computed value of the 'color' property" for the purposes of
determining the computed value of the currentColor
keyword is the computed value of the 'color' property on the element in
question. [CSS3COLOR]
If a canvas gradient's addColorStop() method is called with the
currentColor keyword as the color, then the computed
value of the 'color' property on the canvas element is the one that is used.
This specification refers to both HTML and XML attributes and DOM attributes, often in the same context. When it is not clear which is being referred to, they are referred to as content attributes for HTML and XML attributes, and DOM attributes for those from the DOM. Similarly, the term "properties" is used for both ECMAScript object properties and CSS properties. When these are ambiguous they are qualified as object properties and CSS properties respectively.
To ease migration from HTML to XHTML, UAs conforming
to this specification will place elements in HTML in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, at least for the
purposes of the DOM and CSS. The term "elements in the
HTML namespace", or "HTML elements" for
short, when used in this specification, thus refers to both HTML and XHTML
elements.
Unless otherwise stated, all elements defined or mentioned in this
specification are in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
namespace, and all attributes defined or mentioned in this specification
have no namespace (they are in the per-element partition).
The term HTML documents is sometimes used in contrast with XML documents to specifically mean documents that were parsed using an HTML parser (as opposed to using an XML parser or created purely through the DOM).
Generally, when the specification states that a feature applies to HTML or XHTML, it also includes the other. When a feature specifically only applies to one of the two languages, it is called out by explicitly stating that it does not apply to the other format, as in "for HTML, ... (this does not apply to XHTML)".
This specification uses the term document to refer to any use of HTML, ranging from short static documents to long essays or reports with rich multimedia, as well as to fully-fledged interactive applications.
For readability, the term URI is used to refer to both ASCII URIs and Unicode IRIs, as those terms are defined by RFC 3986 and RFC 3987 respectively. On the rare occasions where IRIs are not allowed but ASCII URIs are, this is called out explicitly. [RFC3986] [RFC3987]
The term root element, when not explicitly qualified as referring to the document's root element, means the furthest ancestor element node of whatever node is being discussed, or the node itself if it has no ancestors. When the node is a part of the document, then that is indeed the document's root element; however, if the node is not currently part of the document tree, the root element will be an orphaned node.
An element is said to have been inserted into a document when its root element changes and is now the document's root element.
The term tree order means a pre-order,
depth-first traversal of DOM nodes involved (through the parentNode/childNodes relationship).
When it is stated that some element or attribute is ignored, or treated as some other value, or handled as if it was something else, this refers only to the processing of the node after it is in the DOM. A user agent must not mutate the DOM in such situations.
When an XML name, such as an attribute or element name, is referred to
in the form prefix:localName, as in xml:id or
svg:rect, it refers to a name with the local name localName and the namespace given by the prefix, as defined
by the following table:
xml
http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace
html
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
svg
http://www.w3.org/2000/svg
For simplicity, terms such as shown, displayed, and visible might sometimes be used when referring to the way a document is rendered to the user. These terms are not meant to imply a visual medium; they must be considered to apply to other media in equivalent ways.
DOM interfaces defined in this specification use Web IDL. User agents must implement these interfaces as defined by the Web IDL specification. [WEBIDL]
The construction "a Foo object", where Foo is
actually an interface, is sometimes used instead of the more accurate "an
object implementing the interface Foo".
A DOM attribute is said to be getting when its value is being retrieved (e.g. by author script), and is said to be setting when a new value is assigned to it.
If a DOM object is said to be live, then that means that any attributes returning that object must always return the same object (not a new object each time), and the attributes and methods on that object must operate on the actual underlying data, not a snapshot of the data.
The terms fire and dispatch are used interchangeably in the context of events, as in the DOM Events specifications. [DOM3EVENTS]
The term text node refers to any
Text node, including CDATASection nodes;
specifically, any Node with node type TEXT_NODE (3) or CDATA_SECTION_NODE
(4). [DOM3CORE]
The term plugin is used to mean any content handler, typically a third-party content handler, for Web content types that are not supported by the user agent natively, or for content types that do not expose a DOM, that supports rendering the content as part of the user agent's interface.
One example of a plugin would be a PDF viewer that is instantiated in a browsing context when the user navigates to a PDF file. This would count as a plugin regardless of whether the party that implemented the PDF viewer component was the same as that which implemented the user agent itself. However, a PDF viewer application that launches separate from the user agent (as opposed to using the same interface) is not a plugin by this definition.
This specification does not define a mechanism for interacting with plugins, as it is expected to be user-agent- and platform-specific. Some UAs might opt to support a plugin mechanism such as the Netscape Plugin API; others might use remote content converters or have built-in support for certain types. [NPAPI]
Browsers should take extreme care when interacting with external content intended for plugins. When third-party software is run with the same privileges as the user agent itself, vulnerabilities in the third-party software become as dangerous as those in the user agent.
Some of the algorithms in this specification, for historical reasons, require the user agent to pause until some condition has been met. While a user agent is paused, it must ensure that no scripts execute (e.g. no event handlers, no timers, etc). User agents should remain responsive to user input while paused, however, albeit without letting the user interact with Web pages where that would involve invoking any script.
This section is non-normative.
This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.
The in-memory representation is known as "DOM5 HTML", or "the DOM" for short.
There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.
The first such concrete syntax is "HTML5". This is the format
recommended for most authors. It is compatible with all legacy Web
browsers. If a document is transmitted with the MIME type text/html, then it will be processed as an "HTML5"
document by Web browsers.
The second concrete syntax uses XML, and is known as "XHTML5". When a
document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is processed by an XML
processor by Web browsers, and treated as an "XHTML5" document. Authors
are reminded that the processing for XML and HTML differs; in particular,
even minor syntax errors will prevent an XML document from being rendered
fully, whereas they would be ignored in the "HTML5" syntax.
The "DOM5 HTML", "HTML5", and "XHTML5" representations cannot all
represent the same content. For example, namespaces cannot be represented
using "HTML5", but they are supported in "DOM5 HTML" and "XHTML5".
Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be represented using
"HTML5", but cannot be represented with "XHTML5" and "DOM5 HTML". Comments
that contain the string "-->" can be represented
in "DOM5 HTML" but not in "HTML5" and "XHTML5". And so forth.