Know About Web Designing: HTML5 Introduction – What is HTML5 Capable of, Features, and Resources

After analyzing our new focus here at 1WD, which basically is teaching new, young, designers about web design and helping them improve their skills and to start in the business, we realized that we really need to go as deep as possible into the basics. And while we covered many of these already, two basic things are still missing from the website, and these two are in-depth introductions and discussions about HTML5 and CSS. Therefore it is one of my assignments for the next period to teach you about these two technologies and, after this, to create several tutorials for you. So in the next two to three months, I will cover aspects of front-end web design, basic coding and tutorials about them. Buckle up and get ready to become better at coding!

What Is HTML5?

HTML5 is the newest hyper text markup language for websites from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The first draft was made public in 2008, but not much happened until 2011. In 2011, HTML5 was released and people started writing about it and using it, but the support in different browsers was still poor. Today all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE) offer HTML5 support, therefore the newest HTML technology can be used at its best today.

The official logo of HTML5

HTML5 works with CSS3 and is still in development. W3C plans to release a stable version next year, but it still looks like this is a long shot. Since its release, HTML5 has been in continuous development, with the W3C adding more and more impressive features, therefore it seems quite unlikely that HTML5′s development will end soon, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

HTML5 is the successor of HTML 4.01, released for the first time in 1999. The internet has changed significantly since 1999 and it seemed like the creation of HTML5 was necessary. The new markup language was developed based on pre-set standards:

New features should be based on HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript.
The need for external plugins (like Flash) needs to be reduced.
Error handling should be easier than in previous versions.
Scripting has to be replaced by more markup.
HTML5 should be device-independent.
The development process should be visible to the public.

What’s new?

HTML5 was created to make the coding process easier and more logical. You will see a bit later that many syntaxes are now deprecated and soon to be kicked out through the back door. The unique and impressive features HTML5 comes with are in the multimedia department. Many of the features it comes with have been created with the consideration that users should be able to run heavy content on low-powered devices. The syntactic features include the new

There are a bunchload of new syntaxes added, but below I will name and describe the most important. The rest of them can always be found in W3C’s HTML5 section.

– this tag defines an article, a user comment or a post, so an independent item of content
– the aside tag marks content aside from the page content, which for example could be a lateral sidebar
,
– you won’t need to manually name IDs for headers and footers, as now you have a pre-defined tag for them
– the navigation can now be placed in the markup in between the nav tags, which will automatically make your lists act like navigation
– this is another important new syntax, as it can define any kind of sections in your document. It works pretty much like a div which separates different sections.
, – these two obviously mark sound or video content, which will now be easier to run by devices.
– this new tag defines a container for interactive content (plugin) or external application
– the canvas tag is quite exciting, as it allows drawing graphics via scripting (mostly JavaScript, but some others can be employed as well)

What is important to remember is that the new HTML5 tags do not always work as the ones before. For example, the header and footer tags will not only mark the start and the end of a page, but also the start and the end of each section you have. This means that these two tags are likely to be used more than once in the whole page. In the illustration below can you see what I mean.

Example of how HTML5 code looks like

Oh yes, and the DOCTYPE declaration finally makes some sense. Or, at least, this time it is much simpler than before and it is very easy for us to remember and we won’t have to search for it on the web or copy it from site to site. closed by

at the end of the page is something we waited for for a long time to come and now it finally is here.

Moreover, complex XHTML declarations many of us used before can now be replaced with and long encoding declarations can simply be written in this way: utf-8″>. Can it get simpler than that? It most definitely can’t.

The following tags from HTML 4.01 are now removed from HTML5, therefore browsers do not offer support for them anymore. This means that it is a good idea to go back to your HTML pages and check for them, as they might disrupt the design in the latest browsers.

May 31, 2013

HTML5 Introduction – What is HTML5 Capable of, Features, and Resources

What Is HTML5?

What’s new?

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