15 HTML5 FAQs
Jan 10th, 2011
Since the publication of HTML Manual of Style, I’ve attended a number of meetups and participated in a few forums to promote the book. While a lot of people are curious about HTML5, few really understand what it’s about and many have misconceptions. So, I’ve collected 15 frequently asked questions about HTML5 along with my short answers in an effort to clear up some of the confusion.
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Is HTML5 is the new standard for creating Web pages?
Not Quite. HTML5 is a draft proposal for a standard that will eventually be submitted to international standards organizations which may adopt HTML5 as a standard or may choose to adopt a competing proposal. Right now there’s no serious contender to HTML5 and all of the big players: Apple, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Adobe are behind it, so it is becoming the de-facto standard. However, it is still early in the process. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) expects to finalize the draft and start the process of final review and requests for comments in 2012. Final acceptance as a standard will happen several years after that.
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Is HTML5 a new technology?
No. It’s an extension of existing HTML, adding new elements to the set recognized by HTML4 level browsers and removing some of the restrictions of xhtml.
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How does HTML5 affect my existing HTML4 website?
It doesn’t. The HTML5 specifications require browser makers to support valid HTML4 web pages. You should update your HTML editing tools when new versions are available. If your web pages require a diet of strict xhtml, you should validate any third-party HTML5 code to one of the xhtml standards before embedding that code into your own pages.
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What is new about HTML5?
Several things. The biggest change is that HTML5 documents are explicitly recognized as interactive applications. Every document element in HTML5 has a corresponding JavaScript API that describes how that element should behave in response to user actions and other events.
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Are there new HTML5 tags?
Yes, there are new HTML5 elements that provide richer semantic descriptions of documents: section, article, header, hgroup, footer, aside and nav; new media elements: audio, video and canvas; new form input types: email, url, number range and search; and a bunch of new element attributes.
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Have any HTML elements changed their meaning or how they are used?
Yes, but not many. The small element, which in HTML4 has no semantic value—it just means make the text smaller—is used in HTML5 to markup disclaimers, legal notices and the like—the small print. The anchor element, which creates hyperlinks, can now enclose any other elements excluding other links and buttons. In HTML4, the anchor was strictly an inline element.
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Are there things in HTML4 that are not in HTML5?
Yes, but only a handful of elements and these are not really gone; they are just marked as obsolete. Browser makers can continue to support these elements in their new versions and most will. Among the elements marked as obsolete in HTML5 are: frame, frameset, big, center, font, strike, acronym, applet, isindex and dir.
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What exactly is HTML5 Video?
Nothing, really. The term HTML5 video is used to differentiate the playing of a video directly by a browser encountering a web page’s video element, as opposed to being played by a third-party browser plugin via an object or embed element. There is nothing intrinsic about any video that makes it HTML5-ish as opposed to Flash-ish. The distinction is entirely a matter of how the a web page is coded to present the video.
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Is HTML5 video better than Flash video?
Yes, but not in terms of video quality which is a function of how the video data is encoded. HTML5 video is better because the video element can interact with other elements on the page and can be styled using CSS. Also, HTML5 video should use less resources because it is built into the browser.
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Will HTML5 kill Adobe’s Flash?
Nope, Flash will be around for a long time. As a media player, Flash accommodates digital rights management (DRM) which hasn’t been addressed in the HTML5 specs. As an applications platform, Flash has a large, installed base in corporate environments where there’s no compelling rationale for rewriting working applications in HTML5. For new applications, HTML5 has advantages over Flash: content is better exposed to search engines, there’s complete integration with other document elements, no plugins are required and HTML5 tools are free.
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Is HTML5 is a threat to Microsoft?
No. Microsoft embraces HTML5. The IE9 beta has received high marks for its HTML5 support. Silverlight is not the only path to interactivity in Redmond.
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Is HTML5 ready for prime time?
Some of it is and some of it isn’t. New HTML5 semantic elements have good support in all modern browsers, including IE if an HTML5 shim or the Modernizer JavaScript library is loaded into a web page. The audio, video and canvas elements are not supported in Internet Explorer yet, but these elements are designed to gracefully fail and fallback to other technologies, like Flash and Silverlight, in legacy browsers. Other technologies that are associated with HTML5 such as Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Web Sockets, Web Storage and Geo-location have only limited support in the current crop of browsers.
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Where can I get an HTML5 browser?
Opera, Chrome and Safari provide pretty solid support for HTML5 in their current versions including their browsers for iPhones, iPads and Droids. Firefox’s support for HTML5 is weak in its current version (3.6) but quite robust in the Firefox4 public beta.
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What about Internet Explorer?
Internet Explorer is late to the HTML5 party. There’s no HTML5 support in IE8 or previous versions. However, adding a JavaScript library such as Google’s HTML5 shim or Modernizer enables IE 6, 7 & 8 to recognize the new semantic level elements so they can be styled with CSS. HTML5 support is good in the beta version of IE9 which is available for Windows Vista and Seven users. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 mobile browser is built largely on the IE7 code base.
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What is an HTML5 application?
There are several new capabilities in HTML5 which directly address the need for creating interactive applications. Of course, HTML has had interactive capabilities since its early days with text-based input forms and HMTL5 expands these with new input types. New capabilities include page and session-based data storage in the user’s browser, Web sockets for inter-application communications, and a drawing environment, the canvas element, for creating and manipulating image data.
