And for anyone who needs some bona fide examples of new standards and updates that are useful from the WHATWG specifications, well how about:
New semantic elements like header, footer, section, article, nav, aside, main, etc. These are far better for making logically structured pages than a ton of divs with class names would be.
The various new input types and attributes. Now you can have input fields which validate email addresses and phone numbers, present the right keyboard for the type of input you want, do various other validation checks or even provide things like a nifty date picker without JavaScript.
Picture and srcset too. No more having to load giant images on mobile devices or have blurry ones on devices with retina support, you can choose which image displays on which type of device.
The preload attribute and what not. Being able to load content the user will likely need in the background is helpful.
The built in video and audio elements, obviously. Again, object was a terrible solution for this, which was unsemantic, was awkward to use and struggled in certain browsers. These elements don't.
The canvas tag and things you can do with it.
And this will be a controversial one, but... most of the old elements that were made official by 'paving the cowpaths' were nice to see added too. The whole fiasco involving embed/object in the old days and how supporting multiple browsers meant invalid HTML was a bit of a farce really, especially as neither were particularly 'semantic' to begin with. Seeing them both made official and better alternatives provided just puts a lifelong issue at rest.
if only all of those things were fully flushed out in the various browsers... for instance, it disheartening to realize that it's been 15 years already and useful form elements like date(-time), phone, and email still don't have reliable and complete cross-browser behaviors, validation (i know it's hard, but still), and styling/event hooks.
True, support still isn't perfect. The calendar/date picker stuff is especially annoying here, since it really should be easier to customise and more similar cross browser than it currently is.
But most of the things mentioned do work in more browsers than not, and you can use them without worrying the site will break in almost all cases. The new semantic elements will never have issues (unless you're trying to target IE8 or below), the validation works fine in pretty much all modern browsers (as do simple styles for it) and support for the picture element and srcset are pretty good too.
The likelihood of anyone using the Blackberry browser or IE mobile is small enough to ignore.
And for anyone who needs some bona fide examples of new standards and updates that are useful from the WHATWG specifications, well how about:
New semantic elements like header, footer, section, article, nav, aside, main, etc. These are far better for making logically structured pages than a ton of divs with class names would be.
The various new input types and attributes. Now you can have input fields which validate email addresses and phone numbers, present the right keyboard for the type of input you want, do various other validation checks or even provide things like a nifty date picker without JavaScript.
Picture and srcset too. No more having to load giant images on mobile devices or have blurry ones on devices with retina support, you can choose which image displays on which type of device.
The preload attribute and what not. Being able to load content the user will likely need in the background is helpful.
The built in video and audio elements, obviously. Again, object was a terrible solution for this, which was unsemantic, was awkward to use and struggled in certain browsers. These elements don't.
The canvas tag and things you can do with it.
And this will be a controversial one, but... most of the old elements that were made official by 'paving the cowpaths' were nice to see added too. The whole fiasco involving embed/object in the old days and how supporting multiple browsers meant invalid HTML was a bit of a farce really, especially as neither were particularly 'semantic' to begin with. Seeing them both made official and better alternatives provided just puts a lifelong issue at rest.