HTML5: The 4 W’s

Posted March 7, 2011 By Steve Garcia |

The new buzz word around the Internet, especially among website developers, is HTML5. What’s interesting is that HTML5 has been available in a majority of browsers for some time, it hasn’t started gaining any traction until just recently.

The ‘What’

HTML5 is the fifth version of the HTML language.  It will eventually replace HTML4, which was originally released in 1997. With each new version of HTML, functionality and usability increases, giving developers more tools to work with when building websites.

The ‘Why’

Technology progresses swiftly (we’ve already witnessed four versions of the iPhone and a new version of the one-year-old iPad this month) and standards need to progress along with them. The mobile market has exploded the past few years giving us the ability to browse the web on the go. Anyone who owns an Apple mobile device has learned very quickly that Flash sites and applications are not supported on the device. HTML5′s ‘canvas’ will help fix some of your rich-media woes. Being able to embed video and audio files directly into the browser will allow visitors to view and listen to these files without the need for additional plugins. Basically, every visitor, whether mobile or on a computer, will see the same thing, as long as their browser is HTML5 ready, which brings us to …

The ‘Who’

Even with all of the excitement around HTML5, it has not immediately become the new standard. If your web browser doesn’t support HTML5, you won’t be able to see the functionality it provides. Recent versions of popular browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome support HTML5. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 8 has minimal HTML5 support and Internet Explorer 7 has none at all. The exact percentages of Internet Explorer’s market share compared to other browsers varies, but is still above 25%. This shows that a major portion of the market will not benefit from HTML5. Microsoft reports that Internet Explorer 9 will have full support of HTML5, but at the time of this writing, it has not been officially released.

The ‘When’

No one knows for sure when HTML5 will be considered the web standard, it can only be accepted as long as it’s supported.

Web developers everywhere are waiting for the release of Internet Explorer 9 and wondering how quickly it will replace versions 7 & 8 as the IE standard. In the meantime, organizations such as Google and YouTube have begun incorporating HTML5 only for additional functionality to their sites.

Here are few examples of interesting uses of HTML5:

Keep your eye on Google’s search pages! They have already created a playable Pac-Man game using their name as the maze and animating its logo with bouncing particles.

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Steve Garcia is TradeMark Media's developer. Steve handles the development phase of projects and provides site maintenance and support.

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