You have most probably heard about it, maybe you have even interacted with a website using it without knowing, well it is definitely on the rise! We are talking about the now popular HTML5 web standard which had its initial draft released on Jan 22, 2008. It sure has gone a long way since then, with more and more big players in Silicon Valley and the world adopting it and pushing it forward with their innovations.

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is simply HTML, you may be wondering what’s the difference? What does it bring to the table that makes it so attractive to use? And why are people so crazy about it?!

Before we answer those question, you need to know that HTML5 is still not a final specification, it still has a long way to go before it reaches a full maturity state, but nevertheless, it is complete enough to the level that many big players and as well as other websites use it (an great example would be the latest LinkedIn iPad app.

Why is it needed?

In the recent years, major web players were introducing technologies and were competing to have their standard dominate, this ended up with a big mess leading to great diversity and lack of standardization. So something had to be done that would tame this landscape in way that guarantees a uniform user experience providing greater flexibility and space for innovation for the engineers. In the next paragraph, we’ll take a look at the major features that were introduced that actually make HTML5 awesome!

What can it do for you?

Embedded Video and Audio, this is a very important aspect if you really think about it, as per the specification, HTML5 supports embedding Video and Audio, this eliminates the need to use Flash. The browser will be responsible for handling that for you. This will help you be virtually browser and platform independent.

The example code below shows you how easy it is to include Video and Audio in your page.

<audio controls="controls"> mpeg" /> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio>

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls"> mp4" type="video/mp4" /> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>

The specification also produces Cleaner Code with Improved Semantics, you will be able to create HTML code that is more readable and maintainable with a new set of tags such as

<nav>
  <header>
    <footer>
      <details open="">
      <summary> to name a few as well as a bunch of removed         tags such as
      <applet>
         <dir></dir> 
      <center>.</center>'
      </applet> </summary>
     </details>
    </footer>
  </header>
</nav>

Designing forms has never been easier with the introduction of new form tags, enabling Embedded Form Validation hence, eliminating the need to use custom javascript validation, except for browsers that don’t yet support this new feature.

Below is an example of an input field for accepting a website URL within a form, notice the required attribute and the pattern for validation then entered URL value.

Website: <input type="url" name="website" />

Another major enhancement to the specification is the Application Cache, which enables you to select what parts of the web application gets stored to the browser’s cache, opening up new ways in thinking about website design and enabling you to provide offline features for your visitors.

Another feature that would be complementary to this would be the Web Storage database which can be used to store session data instead of cookies.

If you are fond of developing websites that are location smart and want to deliver content that is more relevant to your visitors, you would also appreciate the support for Geo Location Support in the specification which is also be adapted by the major browser vendors.

It is also worth to mention the rest of the major introductions into the HTML standard such as Drag and Drop support, Embedded SVG support, Canvas element for drawing graphics.

Wait, What about smart phones?

Don’t worry about this, the guys behind the HTML5 standard did not ignore this major sector, you can still use HTML5 for developing rich web applications that are smart-phone friendly quite easily using the same element set, which is great!

Geo Location support, Offline Web applications, and Web Storage, are a few examples of some of the features currently supported for smart phones.

More and more parts of the standard are being adopted by the smart-phone vendors and soon enough, we’ll have full support.

Final words

As with every new popular technology and advancement in the IT industry, this will open more doors for Software Engineers to have more options, and HTML5 is no exception. As it keeps on flourishing, we will soon (if not already) see more and more full time HTML5 job openings all over the world, and that is definitely good news.

Don’t be left behind, jump in and start learning and creating awesome websites!