On Jan 22, 2008 W3C published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web.

One notable  improvement is the adoption of the widely-used but non-standard <embed> element.

Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively. Other features make it easier to represent familiar page elements, including <section> <footer>; <nav> (for navigation), and <figure> (for assigning a caption to a photo or other embedded content). Authors write HTML 5 using either a “classic” HTML syntax or an XML syntax, according to application demands. See a list of changes from HTML 4.

The HTML 5 specification helps to improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover from errors. This is the first version of HTML developed under W3C’s Royalty-Free Patent Policy.