The web is constantly evolving. New and innovative websites are being created every day, pushing the boundaries of HTML in every direction. HTML 4 has been around for nearly a decade now, and publishers seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers.

To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics. There are a lot of new added features that make web developing lot easier. In this article, we will see an overview of HTML5.

Feature 1:

Unlike the older versions, HTML 5 assists in developing structured sites with the elements like:

• <section>
• <header>
• <footer>
• <nav>
• <article>
• <aside>
• <figure>

Here is an example for structural elements:

HTML4:

{code type=css}

…

{/code}

HTML5:

{code type=css}

Page title

Page subtitle

…

{/code}

Feature 2:

There’s another cool element called <canvas> in HTML5.It is a 2D drawing area controlled by JavaScript. You can use it for a wide variety of things – graphs, games, presentations etc. Because it’s controlled by JavaScript, you can interact with it very easily. Follow this link (http://www.rgraph.net/) to see an example of how <canvas> works.

Feature 3:

Html5 also introduces some new inline elements to specify basic elements like time, numbers, measurement, etc.

• <mark>
• <mark>
• <meter>
• <progress>

Feature 4:

Some elements of the older version like acronym, font, frame, frameset, etc have been removed or replaced.

Feature 5:

Html5 also has some new form input types like

• datetime
• datetime-local
• date, month
• week
• email
• url
• time
• range

Feature 6:

The character encoding for HTML5 is <meta charset=”UTF-8″>.

Feature 7:

Html 5 also has new multimedia elements like <video> and <audio>

The html5 specification is still a working draft, not a W3C recommendation, and thus not stable. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs. There are still more interesting new features in HTML5 apart from the ones discussed here. For more information, you can refer the following site: W3.org

This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 8:53 pm and is filed under HTML5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.