Why Learn HTML5?
Overview
Perhaps, you’ve heard of the revolutionary new HTML5 and have been following the “browser wars” over video formats with interest. However, did you also know that there is so much more to HTML5 than the new video tag? There are many new HTML markup tags and semantic rules, many new attributes, a whole new form validation system and much, much more.
Suddenly, everyone’s talking about HTML5 and ready or not, you need to get acquainted with this powerful new development in web and application design.If you don’t know about the new features available in HTML5 to enhance your business website, now may be the time to find out.
HTML5, promoted as the most important change to the World Wide Web since the development of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is now widely adopted by browser makers and supported by numerous hardware devices – including Apple iPhone, iPad and Google Android. Because implementation is so new, designers and developers are just ‘cracking the surface’ as they begin using the markup language in existing or newly developed websites and for designing across multiple platforms.
HTML5 enriches HTML with syntactical elements, such as <video>, <audio> and <canvas> as well as many other enhancements for handling media content. HTML5 incorporates significant changes to the HTML language used to design web pages. As an example, web browsers currently use plug-ins to run video and audio. However, with HTML5 those capabilities are built into the language and you wouldn’t need to use plug-ins. HTML5, thus, aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application technologies such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.
Gone are the days of adding additional markup just to style a button differently or stripe tables.HTML5’s new markup will help you to create better structure for your content and better interfaces for your forms, resulting in cleaner, easier-to-read code that can be understood by both humans and programs.
You should also be aware of Canvas, a 2D drawing surface you can easily program with JavaScript, geolocation which lets web application visitors share their physical location, local storage capacity that goes way beyond cookies, offline web applications that work after network access is disconnected, several new input types for web forms and custom vocabularies created in HTML5 with microdata.
Features such as web sockets, client-side storage, offline caching, and cross-document messaging can ease the pain of modern web development. In addition, you can compensate for situations where users can’t take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 yet – developing solutions that are backwards compatible and accessible.
HTML5 is still evolving and the specification is still in development, yet browsers such as Safari, Mozilla, Opera and Chrome already support many of its features – and browsers for smart phones are even further ahead, especially iPhone’s MobileSafari browser. In addition, much more is around the corner!
HTML5 and CSS3 can be considered the future of the web development but you don’t have to wait to start using them on your organisation or business website.
Can you or your business afford to ignore HTML5?