Digithoughts

HTML5 is a generating a huge amount of attention at the moment. It seems to affect everything from video on cell phones to how search engines understand web pages, new ways to play games and display graphics to better web apps and more powerful forms.

At Digitaria, we wanted a guide for our staff that could bring them up to speed on the new terms, the new potentials, what’s good and, just as importantly, what’s not so good, about it all.

Given that we are nice, caring people, we decided to share it with the world.

There is a lot to cover – enough that, though we don’t cover every last detail or new feature, this runs long enough that we’ve needed to make a week long feature out of it.

For those who want the 30 second version, or just a taster of what is to come, the topics we are going to cover are:

Semantic Layout

Monday 6/7

HTML5 changes the way you structure HTML documents. Instead of everything being <div>s that only meant something to the coder, their logical structure is there for search engines, text to speech readers for the blind and any other automated system to read.

Video And Audio

Tuesday 6/8

This is the one generating the most excitement right now. HTML5 provides tools for embedding video and audio directly in to pages without using Flash... Sort Of.

Canvas

Wednesday 6/9

Canvas is a tool for adding much of the graphical flourish and flexibility of Flash all without needing Flash.

Forms

Thursday 6/10

Forms get smarter with HTML5. A lot of new pickers for things like date, time and colors get added along with new tools for techniques such as validation.

New APIs

Thursday 6/10

A set of new systems are added for doing some very powerful new things with web browsers: Dragging and dropping, editing documents, messaging systems and data storage for web apps.

HTML4 To HTML5 - What has Changed?

Friday 6/11

For all the new features, HTML5 is built on top of HTML4 with all of its legacy. With years of experience showing what worked and what didn’t work within HTML4, a fine tuning of those older parts was also due.

Adopting HTML5

Friday 6/11

Understanding what HTML5 is, which aspects are supported by which browsers and when the rest of the HTML5 spec will turn up is key. Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of confusion, a lot of promises that aren’t quite backed up yet and a lot of unnecessary panic.

Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development

Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.