Sorry to necro this thread,
If you're adding to the conversation, no need to apologize.
but I wanted to inquire about how everyone feels about the new HTML 5 input types:
As much as I HATE the new "structural tags" considering them to be pointless idiotic redundancies, there ARE good things in HTML 5.
In the case of the new type="" for INPUT those are a "well it's about {expletive omitted} time!"
This is functionality that should have been present in HTML 20 years ago, and basically lets us throw a lot of pointless bloated garbage JavaScript in the trash. I'm always down for having to write less code because functionality was added to the specification.
I think that's what I hate about the structural tags and halfwitted trash like ARIA. Tags like SECTION, NAV, ARTICLE, HEADER, FOOTER, and so forth being a pointless redundancy and seeming to exist JUST to sate the wants and desires of the folks who went from endless pointless tables to endless pointless DIV. Aria roles seeming to be for the people who want everything to be a DIV and refuse to learn how to use the existing tags. Both just mean writing more code for ZERO legitimate improvement in functionality.
Whilst things like the removal of type="" on SCRIPT, STYLE, and "LINK rel="stylesheet", shorter DTD, the smaller charset META, and the new INPUT type are all a blessing and more than welcome if not overdue because they mean less work and less code for the same or even better functionality.
.. and there are new tags that make sense.
TIME for example is another "way overdue" tag since it does serve a purpose, and can even be leveraged with scripting assistance to ajust times locally without having the user have to set their timezone with user accounts. I was actually going to post a snippet in the appropriate forum section about doing that soon.
RUBY, RT, RP, and BDI add much needed non-Latin descended language support. Whilst I don't use them they fix what the far east has been hacking around for decades. HTML was never supposed to be a "English only club".
DETAILS and SUMMARY add functionality used on websites all the time of showing/hiding sections of content -- now we have tags that make semantic sense and provide that!
Actual functionality! -- part of what I hate about the "structural" tags is that not one legitimate UA treats any of them (apart from perhaps MAIN) as anything more than a DIV.
PICTURE to allow multiple SOURCE is a great addition as well, particularly when used for newer image formats that older browsers might not know. Since unknown tags are supposed to be treated as inline-level and these are content-less... but much like AUDIO and VIDEO I wish that all three tags were never added and they just used OBJECT instead since that was SUPPOSED to be the intent of OBJECT.
Hence why the original plan before the WhatWG came along was for even the IMG tag to go away for being redundant to object.
But the functionality is real nice. The ability to go:
<picture>
<source src="images/test.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="images/test.png" alt="A test image">
</picture>
Is freaking awesome given how in supported browsers webp can save you 20-50% in file sizes compared to alpha transparent PNG, and around 10% over non-transparent JPEG. Well worth the extra markup.
Laugh is you can do that in your CSS too. Just wrap the webp declarations in
@supports (background-image:url("image.webp")) {}
you don't even need the image to be valid, it doesn't actually request the file.
Fun stuff.
So I'm not saying it's all bad, but it could still be better by just removing the pointless redundancies.