Oleg Puzanov

professional web developer blog

HTML5 is here

Posted by Oleg Puzanov on Oct 6, 2010 • (3)

As you probably know HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML standard.

It brings a lot of new great features that will drastically change the World Wide Web in the nearest future. Actually, this changes are already there – Google used HTML5 features for video at Youtube.com and Apple launched special promo page on their site to show the advantages of creating rich multimedia web-applications without Flash – yes, they hate Adobe :) . Even Microsoft announced about HTML5 support in IE9.

Here is the list of main differences from previous (X)HTML versions:

  • New layout tags: <article>, <section>, <header>, <footer>, etc.
  • Native media playback directly in browser (i.e. without Flash).
  • Canvas for drawing.
  • New form controls: date and time pickers, fields for email, url, search, etc.
  • Ability for applications to working offline (bye-bye Google Gears).
  • Drag-and-drop.
  • Geolocation.
  • Websockets.
  • Etc, etc, etc – please refer to the language reference on w3c site.

Because HTML5 standard is quite new, a lot of new features still not supported by browser vendors. Here you can find detailed information about HTML5 support by most popular layout engines and here you can test how well your browser support HTML5.

It’s very easy to get started with HTML5. All you need to do is change your doctype to <!DOCTYPE html>. It don’t break your existing layout, because all tags from previous HTML versions still works in HTML5. After doctype switching you will allow to use new tags like <article>, <section>, etc. and start playing with other new features. You can look at several HTML5 experimentation and demos at HTML5Demos

So this is very quick and short introduction to HTML5. In next series we will try to dive deeper into it and try to understand how to use it in real-world projects. Stay tuned :)

P.S. I would like to recommend your great book “Dive into HTML5″ by Mark Pilgrim which freely available online.


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  • Vasiliy Selivanov

    yeah, to be a html coder in 1 year you must be designer, annimator, programmer, tester and of course know html :D
    But interesting, HTML5 or Flash will have better perfomance? Better say HTML5 in IE or Flash will have better perfomance :)

  • http://puzanov.info/ Oleg Puzanov

    It really depends on IE version, because IE6 supports HTML5 extremely good ;)

    BTW, today W3C published HTML5 browser test suite conformance results – http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

  • http://www.unixtutorial.org/ Gleb Reys

    Спасибо за совет книжки, Олег! Всё хочу графический редактор для личных нужд написать на html5. Но это после того как я основы extjs выучу и на практике закреплю :)