Posted by: Arthur Chidlovski, Senior Web Systems Engineer, Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development
For those of us who are involved in the business of software development and building web sites, it is always very important to keep up with the latest trends in web standards. HTML5 is the latest revision of the HTML and it is a definite focus of today's web developers' attention HTML5 predecessors are HTML 4.01 and XHTML.
The history of HTML5 began with the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) work on developing HTML and API for web applications. WHATWG was founded in 2004 by representatives of Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. They were concerned about the direction the W3C were taking with the XHTML. In 2009, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced that the XHTML2 would be cancelled in favor of HTML and that was a definite green light for the HTML5 as a future avenue of web standards.
What are the features that HTML5 brings to the HTML world? In a nutshell these features can be outlined as following:
• Backward compatibility and progressive enhancement-It is one of the main reasons HTML5 is highly appealing to both browser manufactures and developers.
• New elements-Semantically rich elements (section, header, footer, nav), new elements to handle graphics and multimedia (audio, video, canvas)
• New types of form controls-Date and time, email, URL, range, color [32], etc.
• New attributes -Charset (on meta), async (on script)
• Drop of the deprecated elements-(acronym, applet, base font, big, center, dir, font, frame, frameset,isindex, noframes, strike, tt, u)
Similar to previously introduced HTML standards, HTML5 has pros and cons. In terms of pros, HTML5 is strongly supported by the major IT players today. Google is highly supportive of HTML5 because it allows us to produce new rich web-based applications vs. desktop alternatives; YouTube is no longer locked on Flash plugins to deliver multimedia. Apple makes rich web apps on iPhone and Mac platforms and in MobileMe. Microsoft browser manufacturers also seem to be in favor of backward compatibility that HTML5 offers.
On January 18, 2011, the W3C published a logo to represent the use of or interest in HTML5. More and more browsers began to comply with the new standards. Although HTML5 is still in development and obviously is not ready for its prime time, impressive power and the potential of HTML5 and CSS3 can already be seen in many cutting-edge web-based applications and interfaces.


Most modern browsers now have fairly good support for many HTML5 properties but what are the new features and their advantages over
Posted by: Timeline Facebook Developers | 03/16/2012 at 02:36 AM
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Posted by: david | 04/26/2012 at 09:22 PM