The web is evolving at a rate fast enough to make your head spin. The minute you adapt your company’s website to use one web technology another one comes up to make the standards even stronger. The acceptance of these new technologies and standards allows the web to keep pace with web applications that can adapt to multiple new mobile/tablet devices while increasing browser processing power without the need of third party plug-ins. Advent keeps a close eye on these advances and this post will briefly touch on what you need to know about these new standards, how can these advances improve the web and what resources one can use to help integrate these new standards into their own website.

What do you need to know about HTML 5?

HTML 5 is the newest iteration of the HTML web standard that is simplifying and revolutionizing the way the web works. The underlying concept and objective of HTML 5 is to make the browser load pages faster and to make pages more powerful by natively implementing technologies typically handled by third party plug-ins. By making the standard cross-browser compliant, it also ensures that your site functions and looks exactly how you would like it to without having to worry about browser compatibility.

HTML 5 is still considered a “working” standard so not all of the proposed improvements have been accepted or implemented by the major browser makers. However, over the last few years enough browsers across the board have accepted the new standards that the message is clear and that the standard is here to stay. The market has also been voting by abandoning older browser versions that do not implement some of the new standard improvements.

How can these new standards improve the web and your own website?

What many wish to know is “How can these new standards benefit my website and the overall web in general?”. Here are some points to keep in mind when considering moving to HTML 5:

1. Faster Page Loads = A Faster Web – By natively implementing tasks typically handled by third party plug-ins this reduces the overall page load time and eliminates the need for your end user to install anything. This is most significant in the use of streaming video, audio and recently with the increased use of animations using CSS 3. Improvements can also be seen behind the scenes by natively adding options to control storing of page content for later offline use and options to delegate processor intensive tasks to its own processor thread (web workers) eliminating the need for JavaScript to hang up a page.
2. Improved Cross-Browser Compliance and Acceptance – The biggest complaint from web developers about previous web standards has always been the lack of consistent implementation of the standards by browser makers. In the past, a website may have appeared dramatically different if seen in Internet Explorer browser versus a Firefox or a browser on your phone. HTML 5 is changing the end-users viewing experience and is already showing signs of early acceptance by the majority of browser makers including Microsoft®, Apple®, Google® and Mozilla®.
3. Syntax/Layout Improvements – HTML 5 improves basic presentation syntax by adding new descriptive tags that replace the tasks typically handled by generic div tags in the past. This matters because these more descriptive tags help standardize layouts of web pages while also making it easier for search engines to determine the importance of various elements on a page.
4. New APIs – In addition to presentation improvements new APIs have been added to natively handle video, audio, offline content/storage, drag and drop, page history and editing page content.

What resources can I use to implement HTML 5 on my site?

There are numerous resources where one can get started to learn more about the new HTML 5. Below I have listed some of the resources someone should look at when diving in:

•HTML 5 Rocks
HTML 5 Rocks has a great interactive presentation summarizing some of the HTML 5 features and provides sample code, tutorials and a code playground.

•HTML 5 Test 
Convenient site that allows one to score their browser to see how compliant it is to HTML 5 standards.

•W3C HTML 5 Validation
This tool allows one to test their HTML 5 code to find possible validation issues

•Apple’s HTML 5 Showcase
This site shows samples of what is possible using the new HTML 5 technologies.

•HTML 5 Boiler Plate
This provides for a great wireframe template to get started with HTML 5, encouraging the best coding practices and additional resources to help improve your website’s performance.

•Move the Web Forward
This is a great resource to learn more about the standard and how to keep up with the latest advances in the standard.

Tags: html5, internet, web standards, website

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.