The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org) has announced that the HTML 5 specification has become final.
If you are confused what it is all about, check out the advantages and features of HTML 5. This will mark the future of the web, without Adobe Flash and other such insecure technologies. You may probably know about Apple’s long-term disapproval of Adobe Flash. Even Adobe accepts Flash is more or less insecure. In HTML 5, you have amazing list of features, all of which are compared in HTML5Rocks, a web collaboration that talks about the features and benefits of this version.
In short, these are the features offered in HTML 5.
1. Graphics
HTML 5 can show you graphics without the help of any external technologies. The supported list of technologies include 2D/3D Canvas, CSS 3D transforms, WebGL, SVG, SMIL, etc.
With these new 2D and 3D transform features and web fonts, you can use HTML 5 to create presentations on web pages.
2. Offline Capability
Another feature of HTML 5 is that it is capable of providing offline capabilities. The kind of offline work you might have seen in Google Gmail and Gears is what we are talking about. Local storage capabilities can be built into websites and they can work as an app with data stored on your computer (not the server) while you are offline. When you get back online, of course, the data will be synced with the server for concordance. However, this particular feature may have some concerns too.
This coupled with advanced file access features of HTML 5 makes it highly useful for offline computing.
3. Better Connectivity
Have you been waiting for websites to load forever even with a fast connection? One of the major reasons for this is the presence of apps that require not just HTML but some proprietary technologies as well that we recognize by the term plugin or add-on. With HTML 5, since almost everything is built into it, you don’t need most of the plugins. This in addition to its efficient structure makes the future websites lightning fast.
4. Multimedia
For the best part of the decade, online video sites and audio sites have thrived. Games have been developed and played online. Applications have been developed for online use. All of this was possible with the help of proprietary technologies and plugins. With HTML 5, you have audio and video capabilities within the language itself. Formats supported include MPEG (H.264), VP8, Ogg, etc.
5. Semantics
With HTML 5, your websites are going to be more optimized for search engines and social media. They can interact with visitors on a much better level. The websites will have capability of offering not only text-based content but also videos and audios and generate microdata syntax for each of these elements thus making them relevant for search engines.
Conclusion
HTML 5 is what we have been waiting for such a long time. The latest web browsers (most of them of course) support this specification. Some features of HTML 5 are not supported by IE and some of the top browsers. However, Google Chrome, Android browser, Firefox, and other such open source products support most of the specifications of HTML 5.