A New Age of the Internet Dawns with HTML5

Since 2000, web developers have worked under the same standard of web markup; HTML 4.01. While HTML 4.01 allows for considerable flexibility in web design, and is fairly efficient in positioning page elements in conjunction with CSS, there remained a ceiling over the current standard of web development. HTML 4.01 often relied on external plugins and applications while displaying and positioning graphics and multimedia content, which meant inefficiency and slower performance for graphic- and media-heavy webpages. Enter HTML5, the newest standard for internet markup. While HTML5 is a few short years away from becoming the dominant form of web code, some hosting clients have already begun to support it. After all, HTML5 stands poised to solve HTML 4.01’s shortcomings in handling multimedia content and more.

HTML5’s most significant difference from its predecessor is its multimedia functionality. HTML 4.01 recognized multimedia content, whether that content was a sound recording, video or slideshow, all in the same manner. Wherever multimedia content was inserted, HTML 4.01 was designed to recognize it as a generic ‘object’ and call upon an external application to run it. Calling upon an external application to run multimedia content is far less efficient than running this content internally on the web page. Among the new element code tags available in HTML5 are video, audio, and canvas, each of which are designed to deal with a unique type of graphical or multimedia content. The result is a much more efficient platform for integrating multimedia into web pages without the need for embedding players or objects from external websites.

HTML5 also promises significant changes in page structure as well. Much like HTML 4.01 handled multimedia elements as generic objects, 4.01 also handled page elements as generic’s. Although these dividers could be labeled and given unique properties through CSS coding, the fact is that HTML 4.01 relied on a system that coded unique page elements under the same category before identifying them by assessing their CSS traits. HTML5 was designed to provide greater flexibility and efficiency within common page elements than was possible with its predecessors. Specific tags for common page elements is more efficient than naming dividers and adjusting their CSS attributes individually, and also allows for greater customizability when the specific tags are used in conjunction with ‘h’ tags specifying text attributes.

Interaction and modification are yet more advantages to HTML5. HTML 4.01 is a very rigid coding system, and any re-positioning elements of a web page that you’ll find on the web are no doubt the result of an external application or plug-in. HTML5 incorporates flexibility into the nature of its code, allowing for external modification of pages and re-positioning of page elements. Actions such as drag-and-drop, editable content, and interactive visual elements are all possible within the framework of HTML5. The creative potential of modifiable elements opens up a new spectrum of possibility in web design, as HTML5’s predecessors had no such capability.

HTML5 is a promising format for tomorrow’s internet. Through its flexibility, visual capabilities, multimedia integration and its ease of formatting, HTML5 may yet give the internet a complete makeover. While full integration of HTML5 is a ways off, your web hosting may support HTML5, should you choose to adopt early. HTML5’s creative control will put your site ahead of the game, at least until the rest of the world catches up with the new standard.

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