It has been a few years since Mr Berners-Lee started out on his quest to link one document on a disk linked to any other document on any other disk anywhere in the world, but as Tim Berners-Lee himself may say, “we have come along way since my boss marked my memo about hyper text markup language as “Vague but Interesting”"

As of 23rd April 2009 the HTML Working Group which forms part of the HTML Activity have produced a Working Group Note to accompany the HTML 5 Specification.

What does all that mean?

If you have returned to this page after reading through those links, you are either completely enlightened or none the wiser maybe the differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4 might help

No?

Ok, put it this way the internet is continuously evolving and growing at an unmeasurable rate and in keeping with the original insight of Mr Berners-Lee and the inception of HTML 4 in 1997 the core code behind that which makes this page and all future pages has to evolve as well, but it also has to have the ability to understand what makes it tick before that (backwards compatibility).

HTML 5 is still a  draft under discussion but my initial understanding is that it is designed at phasing attributes out that were originally used in HTML 4, but are better handled using CSS.  CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are for presentation and from this draft and the evolution of the internet we are moving into a more parallel way of coding to accommodate new media, i can not wait to see the release of HTML 5.

What does this mean for SEO?

As an SEO i tend to hand code/recode a lot of the sites i work on, the HTML  i use will no longer validate.  If i am to fully understand and use this new syntax draft language and validate it against HTML 5, sooner or later i will need to evolve in my code understanding to fully adopt and recognise that some of the tags i am using need to be changed to meet the accessibilty needs of visitors as well as seperate some of the presentational elements that still reside within HTML 4.

Further Reading

A Preview of HTML 5 (A List Apart December 2005)
A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML (Editors Draft 12th May 2009)