Saturday, April 19, 2014

Introduction to HTML5




HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language as you all know is a markup language used to create a well structured layout for a web page, it came into existence in 1999 since then the internet has changed significantly. But still designners all over the world noticed that something was missing and incomplete but managed and got seasoned by using third party software and tools. Some of the noticeable demerits of html4 were :

  • lengthy document type definitions (difficult to memorise)
  • lack of ability to play sounds & videos without 3rd party plugins (adobe flash, shockwave etc etc)
  • lack of ability to draw vector graphics (but managed by using 3rd party drawing tools & embedded it into HTML file)
  • fewer semantic tags (using the same tags for article, address, header, footer etc etc. for eg: <div> making it difficult to define a particular content)
  • and many more......

You all may be thinking so many missings but still we were structuring our web pages using HTML to be precise HTML 4.01 that was all because we were bound to use what was there and what was available to us. But don't worry gone are the days of limitations as something new has emerged HTML5.

Yes HTML5 ! a new behaviour, name & power for our old markup language. HTML5 which is the latest version of HTML, came into existence in the early 2008 and since then it is slowly releasing it's updates. Today almost every popular browser supports HTML5. HTML5 is developed jointly by World Wide Web (WWW) and Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and is still under development that means there is more & "more is yet to come".

HTML5 was developed to replace HTML4, XHTML and HTML DOM to overcome the above mentioned limitations and many more so that user can design interactive and rich web pages with animations, graphics, music, videos etc without using 3rd party plugins and tools which adds to the page size ultimately affecting your page performance.

HTML5 is device independent as it was designed to work on any device whether you are using a smartphone, PC, laptop or a tablet. Some of many of the features of HTML5 is given below :

  • Two - Dimensional & Vector drawings & graphics
  • Audio & Video playback
  • Drag & Drop operations
  • Geolocation
  • Local data storage

These are some of the features of our latest version of HTML and all of them work without any third party plugin support, there are many more features and many more is to come. Look at the below demo code to get a key idea how HTML5 structures it's contents :



As you can see from the above code HTML5 has a very small, simple & a single document type definition which is eazy to remember than that of HTML 4.01.

HTML5 also defines different and unique tags to define particular contents for our web pages for example <header> tag for header contents like website name, logo, slogan and everything that usually goes inside the header, and <footer> tag for contents like copright information, contact numbers, address etc etc and <article> tag for writing & posting your articles. There are any more which you can learn just keep visiting and wait for our next article which will continue with HTML5 basics.

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Happy Designing !

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