If 2008’s buzz word was Web 2.0 and 2009’s was Social Media, 2010’s might be HTML5. So what is it? Why should anyone care?
As the browser wars heat up, and more people get online via mobile devices, there’s been an accelerated effort to modernize the web. HTML4 was finalized in 1999, and a lot has changed in eleven years.
According to Internet World Stats, global internet usage is up 399.3% from 2000-2009, and 1,162.0% for Chinese speaking users, and 2,297.7% for Arabic speaking users. As more people get online, and nations begin to make high speed access a legal right, it is more important than ever that HTML, the primary language of the internet, becomes more structured.
HTML5, which is not even finalized yet, already has major support from the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, with Internet Explorer 9 catching up upon its release. So what is it?
In one word, it is more contextual. It introduced a handful of new tags so developers and end users alike can have a more consistent experience by agreeing on new standards. Some of the useful new tags include:
- section
- article
- aside
- header
- footer
- nav
- figure
In addition to improved context, there are vast improvements to support imagery and multimedia natively, instead of relying on browser plugins such as Flash. These include new video and audio tags, which are already supported on mobile devices such as the iPhone, and the capability of the browser to render vector graphics. Along with HTML5, CSS has improved in a similar fashion, allowing the browser to natively render animations without Javascript, handle embedded fonts, and draw rounded corners, drop shadows and gradients.
The one-two punch of the improved contextual capabilities in HTML5, and the presentation updates in CSS3 are going to provide us with a smarter, more useful, more beautiful web than we have today.
