HTML 5 to introduce much-needed new tags
There's an article on IBM's DeveloperWorks discussing the proposed HTML 5 specifications and the new introductions.
There's a bunch of interesting new tags including those that outline time-stamps, measured "amounts" of things (like test scores, employee performance or money), article text and navigation. New tags for embedded audio and video are needed, especially considering the proliferation of media online. Also, a progress tag will give immediate feed-back as to the status of a file transfer or download. This information can be consistently updated using Javascript calls and AJAX designs.
Defining these extra semantics allows for increased accessibility and further intra-computer communication. Put simply: your web site's content will be increasingly available to people with disabilities or other computer systems that wish to consume the data.
Sadly this seems to be intertwined with XForms which is another idea that’s been waiting around for a few years for adoption.
Only thing that might get things kick-started is if Firefox and Webkit take on the new features. IE might then have to get off it’s ass and get things moving so they don’t look like they’re falling behind.
So basically they’re building another layer, if you consider it to be similar to an API sitting in between you and something lower level. My experience with this sort of thing is it’s all good when you’re doing easy stuff (ie all the flashy crap they do for demos) but when you want to use it int he real world it’s actually an obstacle.