What is HTML5? Is it ready & who’s using it…. February 22nd, 2012.
There’s a lot of chat in the web world about the ‘magical’ HTML5. So what exactly is HTML5? For those not in the industry I’d say it’s a new standard for creating improved feature-rich websites. For example, native support for video and audio which have previously only been possible with plug-ins such as Flash. The fact that HTML5 is an unfinished standard, with varying degrees of support is something I’d probably leave out of the conversation. Good old Wiki is always there to deal with the technicalities.
For those who do work in the web industry, HTML5 means a lot of different things. Hopefully like me, HTML5 is seen as a positive. As a designer it fundamentally means a new set of HTML tags such as <section>, <nav>, <article>, etc. It means studying boilerplate’s and help-guides like the excellent html5doctor to learn how to implement these new tags correctly.
So why bother moving from the perfectly acceptable XHTML to HTML5 if its not finished? A fair question. The main reason we at Giant Peach have started using the new standard is because we are fully behind this long overdue overhaul of the web. We believe that the more developers, designers, big Corporations such as Microsoft and Google, and everyday web users that get behind the standard, the quicker it will be finalised and the better the WWW will be for everyone.
The likes of terrible browsers (you know who you are IE 6 and 7…) have held back progress for years. Nearly everyone used to use Internet Explorer and so every website was built (often painstakingly) to work nicely with it. Nowadays the market share of web browsers is much more split and browsers in general continue to improve at a faster rate than before.
Test how well your browser supports HTML5
Is it ready?
I’m not gonna lie, there were a few issues creating my first HTML5 site, but overall it went pretty smoothly. It just feels right coding ‘Sections’ and ‘Articles’ rather than ‘Divs’ all over the place. One thing to note though is that Divs still do have a place. For example Divs should still be used for generic wrappers. Viewing the site in Firefox and Chrome, I didn’t have any problems at all. One of the first things you will learn from looking at boilerplate’s – is that older versions of IE require some extra attention, in the form of a shiv. But I also found that IE didn’t want to print nicely, even with the shiv. Luckily I found this additional fix called IE-Print-Protector.
But even with the shivs (which will eventually die out as IE users move to version 9+), HTML5 code is cleaner and there are even some suggestions that it will become favoured by Google for SEO.
Who else is using HMTL5?
HTML5 sites are springing up all over the place. Personally I think Apple’s lack of support for Flash has helped the situation. The amount of people viewing sites on theirs phones and iPads has gone through the roof and people are looking towards HTML5 and CSS3 for the answers to dynamic websites.
Checkout http://www.awwwards.com/ – most of the sites featured here are built to the new standard.
I know I’ve not even touched on many of the other benefits like Geolocation and Canvas, which are the real progressive features but that can follow! Feel free to brag about these below.
