Web Forms 2.0 has been in draft from the W3C.

Some cool new ideas are instore:

1) datalist (similar functionality as “tab completion” like in the addressbar in a browser)

2) more attributes for forms. ie - required, list, min, max, step

3) pattern attribute - this is a POWERFUL feature, supporting pattern matching for validation purposes using regular expressions.

4) pre-filling forms frome external datasets

Of course, all this validation can be enhanced on the front-end now with ECMAScript and DOM, by validating a form without having to send the post to the backend. However, when the submission is pressed, we will still have to validate again on the backend, for obvious reasons - ie accessibilty, noscript, etc.