Episode 143 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Bruce Lawson who is a member of the Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force, works at the Opera team and contributes to HTML5 Doctor. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #143: Happy HTML5 Holidays with Bruce Lawson (MP3, 37:44, 36.2MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Louis sits down with Bruce Lawson to talk about HTML5 semantics, usage, developed, packs, workarounds, polyfills and everything in between. GA_googleFillSlot("InArticle_728x90_1"); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/143. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. As it happens it’s the last episode of the SitePoint podcast for 2011, and with me on the show today I’ve got a suitably fantastic guest, Bruce Lawson. Bruce is a member of the Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force, he works on the developer relations team at Opera, he’s a legend really in the fields of accessibility and web standards, an expert on HTML5 and a contributor to HTML5doctor.com. Have I forgotten anything? And hi and welcome to the show, Bruce, while I’m at it. Bruce: Hi Louis, hi everybody, no, you haven’t forgotten anything that summarizes me, although possibly the Wasp Accessibility Task Force, I’m kind of a emeritus member of that, I haven’t done a great deal with that for a while. Louis: Right. So, yeah, I wanted to have you on the show for a number of reasons, there’s all sorts of stuff going on, obviously HTML5 has been a major topic in the web design and web development world for a little while now, and you’ve certainly got a lot to say on that. In fact, the second edition of your book on HTML5 has just been released if I’m not mistaken. Bruce: That’s right, yeah, I think it came out, I don’t know if it hit Australasia yet, it came out in the UK about a month ago I think, it’s quite exciting for Remy and me, so lots of typos and bits of utterly oblique language corrected and opened up and a whole new chapter on how you can actually use this stuff now because that’s why everybody came up; at conferences and things people will sidle up and up and say, “Oh, sounds great, but how can we use it now?” And it occurred to us that we’d very cleverly omitted to mention anything useful like that in the first edition, so it’s in there now. Louis: Yeah, there was certainly a lot of trepidation, I want to come back to this and sort of ask about the new edition because it is, if I’m not mistaken, the first second edition of an HTML5 book, so that’s got to be some kind of landmark for the maturity of the specification of the language. Bruce: It may not be because my chum, Peter Lubbers, and some colleagues of his from Kaazing wrote Pro HTML5 Programming, which may have come into second edition before ours, it’s certainly out as a second edition, I don’t know who was first but we’re not competing. Louis: What I was saying is we’ve reached that point where there are now second edition books about the topic, so that does say something about HTML5 and maybe its staying power and that it hasn’t petered away. Bruce: Well, it may not be indicative of the maturity, it may be indicative of just how much the whole thing is shifting sands and things are being changed from under our noses so we have to go and rewrite stuff, I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s indicative of [...]