Simplicity of HTML5
July 26th, 2010 by Matt Haff
I read through “HTML5 For Web Designers” this past week, if 85 pages isn’t short enough for you then this post should help shed a little light on HTML5.
A little history fun with tongue in cheek…
In the beginning was HTML 2.0 there was no HTML 1 and it wasn’t that good… W3C saw that it wasn’t good so they created HTML 4.01… It was better but it didn’t serve the W3C well so they created XHTML 1.0 which was the same as HTML 4.01 but it followed the rules. Jump forward about 10 years and XHTML 1.0 is getting left behind and the W3C are upgrading HTML 4.01 to a much needed HTML5.
Change that you can look forward to OLD vs. NEW
No more lengthy doctype!
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict //EN” “http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<!DOCTYPE html>
No longer have to include what type of file you’re referring to.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”file.js”></script>
<script src=”file.js”></script>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”file.css”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”file.css”>
Want to embed a media file? Very new stuff with this, I suggest getting the book to learn more!
<audio src=”file.mp3″></audio>
<video src=”file.mp4″></video>
Old elements redefined and some altogether new
- small – now has the semantic value for legalese, or terms and conditions
- b – no longer conveys extra importance, instead use strong
- i – no longer conveys extra importance or emphasis, instead use em
- cite – now means “the title of a work”
- canvas – new element for creating dynamic images (wanna know more, get the book)
- mark – no added importance only shows that it’s currently of interest
- time – can be used for dates, times, or combines both
- section – used for grouping together thematically-related content
- header – a container for a group of introductory or navigational aids
- footer – should contain information about its containing element, such as copyrights
- aside – chunk of content that you consider separate from the main content
- article – self-contained related content, such as a blog post
- nav – intended for major navigation information
Web Forms, SEO and Internet Explorer
A lot has been done with Web Forms, I won’t get too much into detail but just imagine not having to use javascript to make your forms work correctly!
The outlining algorithm of HTML documents is changing… blockquote, fieldset, and td elements are all immune to the new algorithm. For all you developers out there still using tables to create a web layout… this would be a good reason to stop, it means that your code flooded with <td> is worthless to anyone that wants some kind of SEO capability.
Ofcourse this is a very brief overview of this book, I recommend getting it and reading through all of the in depth uses for the new code. Just remember, it will be a few years before HTML5 is widely used, in Internet Explorer’s case it probably won’t be used until 10 years from now…
Good post! Always great to see people supporting HTML5. I'm not too sure about it being a few years before it's widely used though, depending on your definition of widely. I'd say it's already getting used pretty widely. Sure it's optional but I see it pretty much every day on vimeo. It's coming up hard and fast.
scorch07
August 13th, 2010
I know that some of the stuff is supported but a lot of the really cool stuff isn't yet. By widely I mean the outdated giant of Internet Explorer.
cwsites
August 15th, 2010