HTML5 hasn’t been around that long, it’s a set of standards that won’t be complete until a few years time according to Phillippe Le Hegaret from the W3C who said “The problem we’re facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it’s a little too early to deploy it because we’re running into interoperability issues.” However, with all the new features and excitement, it can be difficult to sit back and do nothing while loads of people are already making good use of the new markup version.
Google is already taking advantage of sites that use HTML5 because it structures data in a way that makes it more understandable to them. If you’re using Google+ and your friends are already using new features such as the author tag then you’ll eventually start noticing how Google ranks content better from people who are connected with you and even shows their photo with a link to their Google+ profile, Twitter or whatever else they have stored about the person. So that’s only the start of how good this is in terms of SEO.
For starters, it has a shortened DOCTYPE tag so when you’re starting a new document instead of typing this -
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” ”http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
You would just use this -
<!DOCTYPE html>
It makes everything much more simple. You don’t even need to add the ‘type’ attribute to your styles and scripts because it simply isn’t required anymore. It’s solved a lot of the problems you’d usually require JavaScript for such as having a required text field, having placeholder text in that text field and we can even make use of the new autofocus attribute. We can insert video using a video tag and even preload that video using the preload attribute so it really just makes our lives easier.
But HTML5 is the new craze that helps structure the web better by using semantic markup and microformats data. The other new side to it is CSS3 which allows you to style the web better in many different ways. There’s a trend going on with these 2 technologies and JavaScript because they can all work together to create stunning visual effects and functionality. Adobe has even created a new preview tool called Edge which is bound to replace Flash with it’s animation editing interface. With this useful new application you can create amazing animated effects using the very fundamental mechanics every web browser supports.
Apple loves these web standards so much that it dropped Flash support for their mobile devices. Though there is an argument here because Flash has it’s advantages too, even though it’s not a standard and a broswer add-on, it creates fancy rich media advertisements, great online games and loads of other things. YouTube has been playing it smart though as it rolls out their new HTML5 player to replace the Flash one so we can see the engine slowly going out. There’s too many features to cover but some include a new canvas tag, client side storage and WebGL which is slowly going to become the next big thing.
WebGL is a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software and if you have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl you can see some of the experiments that have already begun and in fact you may notice that there’s a lot of potential for this replacing Flash too.
So with better organised code for the web, hundreds of new features and a new graphics rendering engine powered by JavaScript it can be quite exciting web designers and developers. But with the web always evolving the standards not yet complete and won’t be for a couple of years time so anything could change. If you do decide to start updating your skills to these new standards, just keep aware of the compatibility issues that could arise as this is the only thing preventing some people from using it before it’s a complete standard. By then browsers will be HTML5 compatible and ready for these new kind of websites, but for now, use HTML5 Readiness to know which features you can make yourself comfortable with and which ones you should perhaps wait a bit for until supported.
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google+
Blog Feed