Web Design with HTML and CSS

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The motivation behind HTML5

Web Design with HTML and CSS Digital Classroom

HTML5 is marketed as a signifi cant evolution in web design; however, it is more than just a new set of HTML tags.

There is a diff erence between the HTML5 core and the HTML5 family. You can defi ne the

HTML5 core as new markup elements used to build web pages. Many of these elements include

traditional HTML tags, such as <p>, <ul>, and <div>. The HTML5 family includes the HTML5

core and technologies such as CSS3, geolocation, Web Storage, Web Workers, and Web Sockets.

As web pages and web applications become increasingly sophisticated, there is a limit to what the

current languages can do. HTML5 represents an evolution in the current capabilities of browsers.

The motivation behind HTML5

The version of HTML currently in use is HTML4.1. XHTML1.0 is largely the same as

HTML4, but with stricter rules, such as requiring lowercase tags and for all opening tags to

have a closing tag. The original specifi cation for HTML5 was called Web Applications 1.0,

and this name hints at some of what the new language is trying to accomplish: to provide a

method of making HTML capable of doing more than its current format.

For example, HTML cannot currently play multimedia such as audio and video; it requires

a browser plugin such as Flash or QuickTime. HTML also has no capability to store data.

There is no native drawing format in HTML; graphics and animations are currently supplied

as image fi les or through browser plugins such as Flash, Java, and Silverlight. Many of these

limitations are addressed in the evolving HTML5 family. The next section describes the core

changes in the HTML5 markup.