The W3C says the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications" but does not imply validity or conformance to a certain standard.
HTML 5 is the next generation of HTML, specifically designed to make it easier to develop web pages. HTML5 will be the new standard for HTML, XHTML, and the HTML DOM (Document Object Model).
It is also an attempt to define a single markup language that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax. It includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and APIs for complex web applications.
The specification is an ongoing work, and is expected to remain so for many years, although parts of HTML5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the whole specification reaches final Recommendation status. It may still be years before this stage is reached, but many parts of the specification are already stable and may be implemented in products, for example I’ve noticed that some Blogger templates are already built on HTML5.
Visit the W3C Schools HTML5 tutorials to learn all about HTML5. Here are just a few basic issues to take note of, to get you kick-started.
HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern websites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block), <footer> (usually referring to bottom of web page or to last lines of HTML code), or <audio> and <video> instead of <object>.
Phrase text formatting has been simplified. Since HTML 4.01 there was an understanding that you should use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format text, for example bold and italic. This is still the case, but in HTML5 you should use the <i> or <b> tag to define some part of a text as italic or bold type, but not how the entire block of text renders in the layout. Examples of other text formatting elements that can be used inline are: <cite> for a citation, <dfn> for a definition, <em> for emphasized text, <q> for a short quotation, <small> for small text, <strong> for strong text. There are more… read the tutorials!
Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as <font> and <center>, whose effects are achieved using CSS. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., in JavaScript) in Web behaviour.
Some of the most interesting new features in HTML5:
- The canvas element for drawing
- The video and audio elements for media playback
- Better support for local offline storage
- New content specific elements, like article, footer, header, nav, section
- New form controls, like calendar, date, time, email, url, search
The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite the similarity of its markup. However, it has been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. It comes with a new document type element that looks like an SGML document type declaration, <!DOCTYPE html>, which triggers the standards-compliant rendering mode in browsers.
HTML5 is not yet an official standard so no browser will have full HTML5 support, but all the major browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer) continue to add new HTML5 features to their latest versions.
Are you ready to start using HTML5?
