18 Chapter 1—Overview of the New Web Standard
Summary
This chapter begins with a bit of historical background and then provides a high-
level overview of the changes the HTML5 specification brings to web develop-
ment. In addition to a look behind the scenes of the specification development,
our main focus is on the long list of new elements, attributes, and APIs. Two
brief Hello world! examples demonstrate the basic frame of a website encoded in
HTML5 and XHTML5, and last but not least we address the question: Can I start
using HTML5 now? The answer is yes, albeit with minor reservations. But now
we will move on to the practical application of HTML5. Let’s first start with a big
chunk of innovations: more structure and semantics for documents!