«
»

  • HTML5 in brief – Getting Started

    HTML5
    13th July 2010 -By Vinu Thomas

    HTML5 source code

    If you’ve been hearing about the buzz about HTML5 and what it is – here’s a brief post and ways to get to know HTML5 better.

    HTML5 is the latest version which newer HTML and XHTML documents should confirm with. This version of HTML aims at simplifying and overcome issues with the older HTML4 presented.

    The first thing you’ll notice in HTML5 is that the HTML declaration itself is simplified. To declare a HTML document, all you need to do is to declare the document in this way:

    < !DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Sample HTML5 Document</title>
</meta></head>
<body>
This is my first HTML5 document
</body>
</html>

    You’ll notice that the standard DOCTYPE declaration which is required in HTML4 is missing here. This is the first in many simplifications which eases up development in HTML5.

    There’s simplifications on other tags also. For example HTML5 features a <video> tag which makes it easy to embed videos in your page, without any third party plugins, as simple as this:

     <video src="mymovie.webm" controls>
If you are seeing this, your browser may not be fully HTML5 compliant.
</video>

    There’s still debate about what the default format for HTML5 videos should be, Google in the meanwhile has introduced the WebM format which royalty-free high quality video compression codec for use on the web. This format has eventually gotten the support of Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Google. The newer nightly builds of Firefox and Chrome support this format.

    If you are looking at exploring the differences between HTML4 and HTML5, this links should be of help – HTML5 differences from HTML4. Another very useful site for developers who are new to HTML5 is Dive into HTML5. The author of this site explains the basics of HTML5, what’s new with it and how to do stuff with it in a simple way.

    To get you started on HTML5, here’s a screencast by Addy Osmani which takes you through the basics in under 5 minutes.

    Even though the HTML5 specs are still evolving, and browser support for the new features may time sometime to stabilize, the power of HTML5 is the way to go. The first uses of HTML5 is going to be what is powering the mobile web, since most Smartphones these days are running Webkit browsers which are HTML5 compliant.

    I’ll be taking a deeper look into HTML5 in the future posts, so look in the HTML5 section here for updates. Here are the links from this article for your reference:

    Image credit – via Wikipedia

  • One Response to “HTML5 in brief – Getting Started”

    Leave a Reply