What is HTML5 Anyway?
I just realized that I have been going for a while in this category without defining what HTML5 is? The answers are “it depends” and “depends on who you ask.” You may tempted to define it as the latest version of a mere markup language. However, more recently HTML5 has put on some major muscle with a language tuned for building true web applications with local storage, 2D drawing, offline support, sockets and threads, and more.
But getting back to the markup itself, we have the following convoluted markup for HTML4:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8">
XHTML is no longer the standard for web pages. Developers and the W3C decided to keep extending and improving HTML instead. Amazingly, to turn this “into” HTML5, or to define HTML5, all you need is:
<!DOCTYPE html> <meta charset=”utf-8”>
Much simpler, right?It’s not only good for the current version of HTML5, but the W3C HTML standards guys have said it’s the doctype for every future version of HTML.
But what about HTML5 as a language? HTML5 seems to be something different to everyone:
- “HTML5 is all about multimedia, getting rid if plug-ins and using the new native support for audio and video”
- “No, its all about more descriptive markup”
- “Actually, it’s about rich Internet clients. Instead if building clients with plug-ins like Flash, now I can use canvas, transform, and JavaScript to make cool interfaces and animations”
- “The great thing about HTML5 is the client-side storage and caching functionality. Can you say offline access to the Web?”
- “I’m excited because I can use web workers to make my JavaScript more efficient and my page feel more responsive”
- “There’s also a ton of new stuff in CSS we can use with HTML5. Advanced selectors, animations and yeah – drop shadows!”
- “Don’t forget mobile. I want to write web pages that know where I am”
The good news us that HTML5 is all these things. When people talk about HTML5 they mean a family of technologies that, when combined, gives you a whole new palette for building web pages and applications. That “family of technologies are defined as JavaScript APIs.
Here is an un-official answer:
Markup + JavaScript APIs + CSS3 = HTML5
