Something else we’ve tried to do is make things simpler. We’ve simplified the syntax (e.g. the rules about what can be quoted, what strings are valid ids, etc, are much simpler now). We’ve made things which people used to do in JavaScript have shortcuts, so now you can just say autofocus=”” to focus a form field when the page loads, instead of using control.focus(), which allows the browser to do clever things like not actually focus the control if the user is already typing elsewhere.
Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification. Hey browsers - start implementing this shit, already!
Source: webstandards.org
