HTML 5 – The latest standard to HTML is rapidly being used nowadays to create a number of websites. Although the foundation of HTML 5 was laid way back in 2004, it came in to the limelight when Adobe announced that it will halt the development of Flash for mobile browsers in 2011.
How different is HTML 5 from HTML?
If you think that HTML 5 is something highly
complicated, then you are hugely mistaken. It is
basically the plain old HTML accompanied by Javascript
and CSS3. Also, HTML 5 contains new and improved
elements and attributes, offers full CSS3 support, easy
to use audio/video tags, 2D/3D support, web storage,
local SQL database, web app and a special type of media
element called Canvas. These small but significant
changes are the main factors that distinguish HTML 5
from its predecessors.
What is the need for HTML 5?
There are certain reasons which make HTML 5’s presence a
necessity even for a layman’s point of view. These
reasons are – an ever growing number of smartphone and
tablet users who use their devices to access the
internet, support from leading companies, rich features
and functionalities, multimedia support and its
simplicity.
All these reasons along with various advantages make
HTML 5 a complete package for creating websites, which
can be accessed from any device.
Main advantages of HTML 5
• Reduces the need for external plug-ins, which was not
the case with Flash. This means you need not download
any plug-ins in order to view a multimedia object or
using interactive elements on a web page.
• Device independent and offers cross-platform compatibility. This means you can run HTML 5 based websites on any device.
• Compatible with almost all the latest web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, IE 9, Google Chrome, Safari etc. This means you needn’t open any particular browser to view certain websites.
• It is the future of web apps owing to its responsive design features.
These are some main advantages of HTML 5. However, like a coin that has two sides, it has its share of disadvantages as well. Let us take a look at some of the disadvantages of HTML 5.
Disadvantages of HTML 5.
• Since HTML 5 is still in the “development phase”,
there can be some issues when it comes to redesigning a
particular website.
• The current HTML 5 version provides very poor browser support. This is one of its grey areas and developers are working on it.
• It is true that the latest browsers do support HTML 5. But what about those who are still using older versions of the same browsers (which do not support HTML 5).
All these above mentioned information formed the crux of HTML 5. If you want to know in-depth about it from a developer’s point of view, you can check different sites, which teach how to the HTML 5 script. Trust me, the more you will know about this wonderful web standard, the more you will be amazed by it!