In my last post I stated “by introducing the new version of HTML 5 developers will find it much easier to build sites”. So I guess a good place to start with making HTML 5 simpler is to start from the top, which actually is probably the most complicated part of XHTML and HTML.
Most developers working with HTML/XHTML are quite use to the the DOCTYPE declaration at the start of their code. The DOCTYPE tells the browser or other application how to interrupt the mark up language of the page. There is a massive list of the various DOCTYPEs on W3C.
These DOCTYPEs are pretty unforgiving. They are case sensitive and had to be spelt perfectly. The worst part is, most browsers ignored them as they were commonly incorrect.
HTML 5 fixes this problem. Instead of trying to find the DOCTYPE snippet from the last site you built, you now just declare [cc lang=”html”][/cc]. No fluffing around with ridiculous long definitions which you will mess up anyway.