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. HTML5 is a language for structuring g and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the internet. Work on HTML 5, which commenced in 2004, is currently being carried out in a joint effort between the W3C HTML WG and the WHATWG. Many key players are participating in the W3C effort including representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft; and a range of other organizations and individuals with many diverse interests and expertise. (Hoy, M. (2011))
HTML5 is a really good thing for web developers and designers, because it: * Is mostly backwards compatible with what's already there — don’t have to learn completely new languages to use HTML5. The new markup features work in the same way as the old ones, and the new APIs are based on mostly the same JavaScript/DOM that developers have been programming in for years. * Adds powerful new features to HTML that were previously only available on the Web using plugin technologies like Flash, or with complex JavaScript and hacks. Form validation and video are prime examples. * Has a clearly defined parsing algorithm so that all browsers implementing HTML5 will create the same DOM from the same markup, regardless of validity. This is a massive win for interoperability. Ingebretsen, R.