I am buying it :-) Don't think of "HTML5" as a monolithic new technology to be ready on date xx/xx/xx. Browsers are gradually adding new features with each release, feature by feature. But as claus says,
for production usage wait for browser support. In the meantime, if it interests you,
experiment! HTML5 specifies the way the current web works *and* extends HTML in a backwards compatible way:
1. A massive amount of work has gone into reverse engineering existing browsers and documenting how they actually work (or should work*). The sheer scale of this feat is awe-inspiring.
2. Previously unspecified bits of the current web are documented (e.g. <canvas>, XmlHttpRequest, innerHTML)
3. New structural elements (e.g. <section>, <article>, <footer> )
4. New media elements (<video>, <audio> )
5. New "app" elements (e.g. <progress>, <meter> )
6. New form input types (e.g. <input type="email">, <input type="date"> )
7. New input element attributes (e.g. "required" and "pattern="[regex]" for validation, "maxlength" for textarea)
8. SVG and MathML support
9. New APIs (e.g. getElementsByClassName(), offline storage, cross document messaging)
HTML5 differences from HTML4 [dev.w3.org] is a good place to start (this is the latest draft of this doc, to be officially published later this week).
* As Mark Pilgrim put it: Browser vendors are already fixing some of their parsing quirks, filling in gaps in their implementations of previously undocumented/underdocumented features, and converging on more interoperable behavior. You won’t see the results overnight, but these are important steps towards making the web a less frustrating development platform.”
