I was at the 2008 European Perl Conference recently and one of the talks I heard was about HTML 5.0. It may seem odd to have such a talk at a Perl conference, but web development is one of the things Perl is used quite heavily for. I went along not really expecting to come away particularly excited. Instead, I came away feeling that they really are going down the right lines.

The thing I like about HTML 5.0 is its pragmatism. It accepts that various things just, well, are the way they are. Whether you think any of the following are points are OK, they are pretty much reality.

• Most web pages don't specify a document type
• Of those that do, plenty of pages don't comply with the document type anyway and a validator would say they were invalid
• Despite this situation, end users expect that web pages that in the eyes of a validator are invalid will still be rendered; any browser that only renders compliant pages will not be able to provide access to much of the web and wouldn't be used by anyone anyway...