HTML5

HTML5 and CSS3 are more than just two new standards proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its working groups. They are the next iteration of technologies you use every day, and they’re here to help you build better modern web applications. Before we dive into the deep details of HTML5 and CSS3, let’s talk about some benefits of HTML5 and CSS3, as well as some of the challenges we’ll face.

With us you will be learning all the concepts of HTML5 & CSS3.

HTML is the merging language of the World Wide Web. Using just the simple tags it contains, the whole world has created an amazingly different network of hyperlinked documents, from Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, to personal blogs and dedicated websites.

While it is the most determined transform to our common this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The Hyper Text Markup Language was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 1991 he wrote a document called “HTML Tags” in which he proposed fewer than two dozen elements that could be used for writing web pages. Sir Tim didn’t come up with the idea of using tags consisting of words between angle brackets; those kinds of tags already existed in the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) format. Rather than inventing a new standard, Sir Tim saw the benefit of building on top of what already existed—a trend that can still be seen in the development of HTML5.

The complete Road Map for HTML5

There was never any such thing as HTML 1. The first official specification was HTML 2.0, published by the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. Many of the features in this specification were driven by existing implementations. For example, the market-leading Mosaic web browser of 1994 already provided a way for authors to embed images in their documents using an <img>tag. The img element later appeared in the HTML 2.0 specification. Using this tag IE Browser would play Videos. This is developed and stabled as <Video> tag in HTML5.

The role of the IETF was superseded by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, where subsequent iterations of the HTML standard have been published at http://www.w3.org. The latter half of the nineties saw a flurry of revisions to the specification until HTML 4.01 was published in 1999.

It was a Rebel time --- WHATWG TF?

A rebellion formed within the W3C. The consortium seemed to be formulating theoretically pure standards unrelated to the needs of web designers. Representatives from Opera, Apple, and Mozilla were unhappy with this direction. They wanted to see more emphasis placed on formats that allowed the creation of web applications.

Things came to a head in a workshop meeting in 2004. Ian Hickson, who was working for Opera Software at the time, proposed the idea of extending HTML to

allow the creation of web applications. The proposal was rejected. The disaffected rebels formed their own group: the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group or WHATWG for short.

From the start, the WHATWG operated quite differently than the W3C. The W3C uses a consensus-based approach: issues are raised, discussed, and voted on. At the WHATWG, issues are also raised and discussed, but the final decision on what goes into a specification rests with the editor. The editor is Ian Hickson.

On the face of it, the W3C process sounds more democratic and fair. In practice, politics and internal bickering can bog down progress. At the WHATWG, where anyone is free to contribute but the editor has the last word, things move at a faster pace. But the editor doesn’t quite have absolute power: an invitation-only steering committee can accuse him in the unlikely event of a state of affairs. Initially, the bulk of the work at the WHATWG was split into two specifications: Web 2.0 and Web 1.0. Both specifications were intended to extend HTML. Over time, they were merged into a single specification called simply HTML5.

While HTML5 was being developed at the WHATWG, the W3C continued working on XHTML 2. It would be inaccurate to say that it was going nowhere fast. It was going nowhere very, very slowly.

In October 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a blog post in which he admitted that the attempt to move the web from HTML to XML just wasn’t working. A few months later, the W3C issued a new charter for an HTML Working Group. Rather than start from scratch, they wisely decided that the work of the WHATWG should be used as the basis for any future version of HTML.

All of this stopping and starting led to a somewhat confusing situation. The W3C was simultaneously working on two different, incompatible types of markup: XHTML 2 and HTML 5 (note the space before the number five). Meanwhile a separate organization, the WHATWG, was working on a specification called HTML5 (with no space) that would be used as a basis for one of the W3C specifications!

Any web designers trying to make sense of this situation would have had an easier time make sense of.

The fog of confusion began to clear in 2009. The W3C announced that the charter for XHTML 2 would not be renewed. The format had been as good as dead for several years; this announcement was little more than a death certificate.

Strangely, rather than passing unnoticed, the death of XHTML 2was greeted with some mean-spirited gloating. XML naysayersused the announcement as an opportunity to deride anyonewho had ever used XHTML 1—despite the fact that XHTML 1and XHTML 2 have almost nothing in common.

Meanwhile, authors who had been writing XHTML 1 in order to enforce a stricter writing style became worried that HTML5 would herald a return to sloppy markup.

The current state of HTML5 isn’t as confusing as it once was, but it still isn’t straightforward.

There are two groups working on HTML5. The WHATWG is creating an HTML5 specification using its process of “commit then review.” The W3C HTML Working Group is taking that specification and putting it through its process of “review then commit.” As you can imagine, it’s an uneasy alliance. Still, there seems to finally be some agreement about that annoying.

“Space or no space?” question (it’s HTML5 with no space, just in case you were interested).

Perhaps the most confusing issue for web designers dipping their toes into the waters of HTML5 is getting an answer to the question, “when will it be ready?”

In an interview, Ian Hickson mentioned 2022 as the year he expected HTML5 to become a proposed recommendation. What followed was a wave of public outrage from some web designers. They didn’t understand what “proposed recommendation” meant, but they knew they didn’t have enough fingers to count off the years until 2022.

The outrage was unwarranted. In this case, reaching a status of “proposed recommendation” requires two complete implementations of HTML5. Considering the scope of the specification, this date is incredibly ambitious. After all, browsers don’t have the best track record of implementing existing standards. It took Internet Explorer over a decade just to add support for the abbrelement.

The date that really matters for HTML5 is 2012. That’s when the specification is due to become a “candidate recommendation.” That’s standards-speak for “done and dusted.”

But even that date isn’t particularly relevant to web designers. What really matters is when browsers start supporting features. We began using parts of CSS 2.1 as soon as browsers started shipping with support for those parts. If we had waited for every browser to completely support CSS 2.1 before we started using any of it, we would still be waiting.

It’s no different with HTML5. There won’t be a single point in time at which we can declare that the language is ready to use. Instead, we can start using parts of the specification as web browsers support those features.

Keen to avoid the mistakes of the past, the WHATWG drafted a series of design principles to guide the development of HTML5. One of the key principles is to “Support existing content.” That means there’s no Year Zero for HTML5.

Where XHTML 2 attempted to sweep aside all that had come before, HTML5 builds upon existing specifications and implementations. Most of HTML 4.01 has survived in HTML5. Some of the other design principles include “Do not reinvent the wheel,” and “Pave the cowpaths,” meaning, if there’s a widespread way for web designers to accomplish a task—even if it’s not necessarily the best way—it should be codified in HTML5. Put another way, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The creation of HTML5 has been driven by an ongoing internal tension. On the one hand, the specification needs to be powerful enough to support the creation of web applications. On the other hand, HTML5 needs to support existing content, even if most existing content is a complete mess. If the specification strays too far in one direction, it will suffer the same fate as XHTML 2. But if it goes too far in the other direction, the specification will enshrine <font>tags and tables for layout because, after all, that’s what a huge number of web pages are built with. It’s a delicate balancing act that requires a pragmatic, levelheaded approach.