HTML5

Background

HTML5 is an important standard for the improvement of mobile web technologies. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the specification in June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0. The specification is in the Draft Standard state at the WHATWG and in Working Draft state at the W3C (Hickson, 2010). The standard is not estimated to reach the “Candidate Recommendation stage” until 2012 (Hickson, 2010). HTML5 has added new tags for improved interactivity, multimedia and localization (McAllister, 2010). These new tags are aimed at replacing the use of plugins within a web browser. Some plugins like Flash, Quick Time and Microsoft’s Silverlight could see a huge decrease in their client usage within browsers. Additional tags have been added to the standard to provide a more flexible approach to web design and usage. These additional tags provide much more functionality for video, imagery and audio that was previously difficult to implement without plugins within the current stand. Tag elements worth highlighting include:

<article>  a section of content that forms an independent part of a document or site e.g. blog entry.
<Aside> content that is tangentially related to the content that forms the main textual flow of a document. 
<Audio>  an audio stream. 
<Canvas>  resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for dynamically rendering of images such as game graphics, graphs, or other images. 
<Command> the same thing as a command element with its type attribute set to “command”.
<Datalist> a set of option elements that represent predefined options for other controls. 
<embed> an integration point for external content.

The W3C have improved CSS (Cascading style sheets) which is now at level 3 and will be replacing CSS2. Of late, the major browsers have been incorporating CSS3 along with HTML5 in their releases. The additional features added with HTML5 have provided CSS with a wide range of improved methods. These methods include Modules, Selectors, Text Effects and Layouts, First Letter and First Line Pseudo Classes, Paged Media and Generated Content and improved Multi-Column Layout. Once it is fully adopted as a standard with Web browsers and user-agents beginning to use it, then CSS 3 could be a powerful tool for Web designers,