Dries Buytaert

HTML5 is about to rock our world. There are books written about why that is the case, but simply put, it can provide a much better user experience on both desktop and mobile devices, and could lead to a convergence between native applications and the mobile web.

I believe in HTML5 enough that I wanted to make it one of the top 5 initiatives for Drupal 8; and switch Drupal's default doctype from XHTML to HTML5. This is the fifth official Drupal 8 initiative after the Configuration Management, Design, Web Services and Multilingual initiatives.

I have asked Jacine Luisi to be the Initiative Owner for the Drupal 8 HTML5 Initiative. Jacine is a prolific themer and contributor known to be a markup/CSS nut. I'd also like to recognize Jen Simmons for all her evangelism work on HTML5 in Drupal. I hope that work continues as it can feed into the HTML5 Core Initiative.

The way we'll approach this initiative is by starting off with some of the low-hanging fruit, and gradually work our way up to more advanced parts of the specification. In her announcement blog post, Jacine provides a plan for what that means.

To keep track of what is going on, tune into the core issue queue on issues tagged HTML5 or participate in the HTML5 group. Details will be posted shortly on the core initiative homepage.