What Is HTML5 ?

Many people are saying that it’s about time for HTML5 HTML 4.01 was completed in 1999. Others are saying that what HTML5 offers is just too good to pass up. We hope you’ll agree with both opinions.

HTML5 goes beyond all previous versions of HTML in scope and power. In fact, its biggest additions are in the scripting realm, not in the traditional realm of HTML elements at all.


For example, HTML5 supports drag and drop, but you’ve got to use a scripting language like JavaScript to make it work. HTML5 also supports a Canvas control in which you can draw—using JavaScript.


HTML5 breaks down the barrier between HTML and scripting. HTML5 turns out to be very script intensive. It has a bunch of new elements and attributes, but the major push in HTML5 has to do with features that you can access only through scripting.


Whether it’s dragging and dropping items, drawing in a canvas, storing data in the browser between page accesses, browser history, or any of more than a dozen other topics, HTML5 relies on scripting and that
means JavaScript for most people more than ever before. To make HTML5 work, you have to use scripting.


That’s a good thing, because incorporating the new capabilities, which demand scripting, into HTML itself means that browser manufacturers will have to support those new capabilities. Often, what’s possible in JavaScript varies widely from browser to browser, and requiring a lot of scripting support in HTML will make support for the new features uniform across all browsers.


All versions of HTML, including HTML5, are products of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C (www.w3c.org), which is composed of the people responsible for putting together the various versions of the HTML specifications. The version before HTML5, which is HTML 4.01, came out in 1999.


Each W3C specification, called a recommendation (W3C is careful not to consider itself a standards-creating body, so they call their specifications recommendations), goes through several steps.


First comes Note status, where some people at W3C start discussing some issue. Then a Working Draft of a specification is created, and the W3C invites comments. Next comes a Candidate Recommendation, and then the final version of a W3C specification, the Recommendation.


All the features we’ll take a look at in next posts are supported in one or more browsers, but not in all browsers (we’ll be looking at Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari). For each feature, we’ll list which browsers support it.