Looking at HTML5

This is how it all started…


HTML was born in 1990. The creator is Sir Tim Berners-Lee and then he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and made it the driving hands of HTML standardizations. You can read all about this in my previous article. Then it took a very long 5 years to publish the HTML version 2.0. That’s in 1995. However, development was a little accelerated and by 1997 HTML 4.0 was published.

After all this rush, things started to change. XML came along and inspired W3C with its capabilities and then they started to working on an XML based HTML version named XHTML. W3C published XHTML 1.0 in 2000 and decided to abandon HTML, leaving the version 4.01 as the last version published in the same year. That was not good news for some web browser market leaders. Opera Software and Mozilla Foundation, who were among them decided to move ahead of their own.


As a result, Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) was announced in 2004, with major contributions by Opera, Mozilla and later Apple and started developing the next stage of HTML standardization. This is what later called HTML 5.0 or simply HTML5. WHATWG proposed new HTML working group of W3C to adopt their HTML5 to start and was agreed to do so by the group. Since then WHATWG and W3C are working together on the development of HTML5.




What is HTML5 really?

Is it a Flash killer? It can play videos of its own? Can IE support it? These are some of the common chitchat we hear every day and night about HTML5. I would say YES to all these questions.
Just like HTML 1.0 to 4.01, HTML5 is a language for structuring web content. It instructs web browsers how to present the content of a web page. But why the answer is YES? It’s because this has taken a big leap in web development, as it set the standards to support many emerging technologies like multimedia and interactive applications on the web. 
Unarguably, we use flash mostly to watch YouTube videos. With the new VIDEO tag in HTML5 allows not just YouTube but everyone else also to embed videos right away in there website without using any 3rd party plugin to view. YouTube is already in the experimental stage with HTML5. (http://www.youtube.com/html5) YouTube also has teamed up with Mozilla Firefox and Nvidia to provide an HTML5-based online stereoscopic 3D video service. But this is restricted to Nvidia’s 3D Vision-enabled hardware owners.





To be continued...

• What does it got for the developers and designers?
• Is it all there neat and clean to use?

What is HTML?

The simple answer for this question is that HTML is a markup language and with it you can make web pages. Here’s the text book definition.

“HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language. A markup language is a set of markup tags. HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages.”
- http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp

A markup tag, often called an HTML tag, is a keyword enclosed in angle brackets that tells the web browser how to display the content within that tag. Likewise, many number of HTML tags and with various content inside them, describes the web browser how to display a full web page.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

This is how it all began…
In 1980, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee who was a contractor at CERN by then proposed a project based on hypertext with the aim of sharing information among researches. He also build a prototype called ENQUIRE, however that project didn’t move forward until 1989. That year, Berners-Lee again wrote another memo proposing an Internet based hypertext system. Then he continued to worked on the project and specified HTML, not only that but also wrote the browser and server software.

(to be cont...)

Evolution of The Internet

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