Oct 13, 2009

HTML 5

HTML 5 is going to be the markup language of the future, at least that's what some people hope. This new language was created by a group called WHATWG, a small group founded by people from Apple, Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software. The idea was to make designing web pages easier by creating element tags more specific to each area of a page. For instance instead of having loads of div tags in your code you can have a header tag, footer tag, and section tags. The problem with all of these new tags is that there are a ton of them. You can actually download a cheat sheet, which is 4 pages long! Here is a preview below:


All in all HTML 5 does seem to offer plenty of pluses. Not only is the doc type simple (), but it also has new API capabilities. The audio and video capabilities seem to be the most intriguing. By using these, flash players could become obsolete. These are just a few of the many updates that are planned for HTML 5. You can read more about it at SmashingMagazine.

This version is not yet widely used, in fact there are sources that say it will not be fully implemented until 2022. However, you can use this version now you just won't have the full functionality on certain browsers. It is probably a good thing that this will not be completely implemented for quite some years because even though it may be a better way to use markup language, it seems like it will take some getting used to by everyone.

1 comment:

  1. I've heard the Google Wave is built using HTML 5. Granted, Google Wave has a lot of other code besides HTML 5, but it might give you some ideas of the possibilities. I have a google wave account. If anyone wants to see it in action, I can demo it in class. Just let me know.

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