By now you may have heard a little about HTML5 and wondered how will it effect your web authoring. HTML4, the last major version of the markup language, began back in 1997 and a lot has changed in web site technology since. As of this writing, HTML5 has not officially been adopted and remains in draft stage at the W3C. HTML5 is designed so that old browsers can safely ignore new HTML5 markup allowing a smooth conversion to the new way of doing things.

HTML5 changes the common uses of a generic block where you would use <div> for example and in-line <span>elements. Instead of a generic description, a new tag such as <nav> is used to designate a navigation area, <footer> to declare the traditional “footer” section of a page. The way we designate media on a page has changed with inclusion of the <audio> and <video> tags instead of <object>. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript). The modern aspects of web site creation has moved the creators of HTML5 toward open source standards. For cross compatibility reasons, it is not best practice to rely on plug ins like Flash, Silverlight and Java. While these technologies have benefited some features of web sites, they have also created limitations.