HTML5: a look behind the technology changing the web

Technology allows internet browsers to display jazzed-up images and effects that react to users’ action. Developers use HTML5 to get their creations on a variety of smart phones, tablets and PCs without couture apps for specific hardware or the online stores that have become gatekeepers to mobile commerce.

HTML5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure and semantics.

HTML5 which commented in 2004, and currently being carried out in a joint effort between the W3C HTML WG and the WHATWG. Many key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozila, Opera and Microsoft; and a range of other organizations and individuals with many diverse interests and expertise.

                                                              

Structure

HTML5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages,  such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id for class. The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically.

There are several advantages to using these elements. When you want to mark up nested section you can use conjunction with the heading elements (h1 to h6), these provide a way to mark up nested sections with heading levels, and this is possible with previous versions of HTML.

Video and Audio

In these days, video and audio on the web has become increasingly viable and sites like YouTube, MySpace and dozens of others are making it easy for anyone to publish video and audio,  since HTML currently lacks the necessary means to successfully embed and control multimedia itself, many sites are relying on flash to provide that functionality. The new video and audio elements make this really easy.   Flash is currently the only widely deployed plug-in that provides a cross-browser compatible solution with the desired APIs for developers.

The new video and audio elements make this really easy. Although there are some video formats that support their own poster frame feature, such as MPEG-4, this provides an alternative solution that can work independently of the video format. 

Document Representation

Not like previous versions of HTML and XHTML, which are defined in terms of their syntax, HTML5 is defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM).  The advantage of defining the HTML5 in terms of the DOM is that the language itself can be defined independently of the syntax. There are primarily two syntaxes that can be used to represent HTML documents: the HTML serialization (known as HTML5) and the XML serialization (known as XHTML5)