HTML5 – what is it, exactly

By | May 5, 2011

If you’re paying any attention to web technology, you’ll know that there’s excitement building around the possibilities of HTML 5. For the lay-people out there, HTML is the language used to write web pages. We’ve been using HTML 4 since the late 1990s, and while it’s pretty great, there’s things that are a real pain to do in it as well as all sorts of things that are impossible. Hence the existence of Flash plugins and so on.

HTML 5 is a new standard for the web that adds a lot of new features. Some of them look like gimmicks (Speech input and the pulse CSS tag), some look set to become fundamentally important (HTML 5 video), some offer technical capabilities (in browser DB and local storage), some offer simple ways of solving old problems (CSS support for rounded corners), and others look set to significantly change the sorts of content that can be displayed effectively on the web (WebGL and inline SVG).

There’s definitely challenges and issues with HTML 5 – video formats are one, while another will be the inevitable storm of partial implementation errors and browser-specific idiosyncracies. That said, it looks set to seriously expand the tools available to web designers, and that’s cool.

For a good overview of what you might be seeing coming soon in your browser, take a walk through this slideshow from HTML5Rocks.com. It’s best viewed in Chrome 11, and provides a thorough set of examples of what HTML 5 will offer.

Take a look – while it’s of most interest to the technically minded, it’s got plenty of interesting examples accessible to those not so inclined.