Exporting DITA to HTML5

I've been somewhat surprised at the lack of any real discussion on this topic so far apart from a few posts on the DITA-USERS forum about video codec compatibility and a good article by Don Day. The current explosive growth in the number of smart devices deployed will inevitably lead to a strong demand for technical documentation on mobile platforms. PDF- and HTML-based documents as well as eBooks can, of course, already be used on smart devices by means of native viewers, mobile browsers and eBook readers. The PDF and HTML user experience is generally poor, involving a lot of tapping, pinching, scrolling and rotating to get content to display correctly. Although the eBook user experience is much better, especially on tablets, eBook readers are proprietary native applications and mobile platform owners have imposed all sorts of restrictions on content. HTML5 promises to offer a superior user experience for mobile users. Mobile browsers already do a good job of automatically resizing and reformatting HTML5-based content to match devices' screen sizes and resolutions. HTML5 content can be rich, dynamic, and interactive so is well suited to eLearning applications, for example. So I've decided to try and create an HTML5 plugin for DITA! I hope this plugin will provide support for:

• HTML's new semantic elements such as <nav>, <header>, and <footer>
• Inline SVG graphics
• MathML equations
• Offline storage

The latest generation of browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Webkit-based mobile browsers, already support all these features. Internet Explorer is lagging behind as usual, but Microsoft has promised that IE10 will fully support the HTML5 standard. HTML5 is still evolving, so it looks like definitive support for things like metadata and the many Javascript APIs will have to wait for a while yet. But the core functionality is remarkably stable and well-supported, so there's already enough to be getting on with...