What Is HTML5?

HTML5 is the latest round of HTML standards to be released by the W3C ( The organisation responsible for trying to keep wen development sane ).

It has a Tonne Of New stuff, generally making web development and maintenance easier , A site using HTML5 will be ( if not officially supported by the search engines yet ) faster and more efficient for a search engine to crawl meaning  a happy googlebot and in theory better saerch engine rankings. Although this will depend on not misleading or spamming the search engines which we all know they just Love.

Elements

HTML5 includes a plethora of new elements below are the biggies:

• Header – An element specifically for the top section of a website
• Hgroup – designed to hold the logo and link back to the home page etc in the header
• Nav – An element to point out the navigation around the site.
• Footer – Specifically for the bottom of a webpage
• Section – An arbitrary section of the page
• Article – Essentially the content of the page
• Video – A Self Hosted video ( at this stage, Youtube is not supported, but they do output a html5 player in an iframe )
• Audio – For those into some music on a webpage
• Canvas – A tag with some veryspecial properties, this enable dynamic animation and drawing using javascript. it is compatible on Mobile devices and can do almost anything that flash can do!

Browser Compatability

As with any new emerging technology and standards, this is the kicker for HTML5, Cross browser compatability, or more to the point, Does it work in Internet Explorer?

The short answer is no, HTML5 won’t work natively in IE less than 9, but there is good news, there is 2 ways around this problem.

1) Javascript – A small section of javascript will enable the use of these elements in Internet Explorer, but the site is reliant on javascript in those browsers.

2) Chrome Frame – This is a plugin for Internet Explorerto enable HTML5 and CSS3 as well as a fast JavaScript engine but this relies on the user installing a plugin and Javasacript.

The web is moving on, whether people update their browsers or not. Developing for browsers which are past their use by date is very difficult and time consuming.

HTML5 is something that I like to use extensively on every project and if that means that people who will not upgrade their browsers or at least enable javascript then they are doomed from the start.

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