Being a very dynamic industry, web design and development always offers its enthusiasts regular challenges with lots of ongoing innovations and advancements. Since the emergence of the web development, the major focus has always been on server side scripting. Choosing the right platform, framework or CMS for the development project has always been trivial but they all conceive results in a common language called HTML. HTML5 is the latest version of HTML, which is dominant in the industry for more than a decade now. If not identical, modern web and HTML5 are often found to be used synonymously by the web experts. Lets look at the journey of HTML5 in the recent years.

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have been working in collaboration for the advancement of HTML5. HTML5 was released with many advanced functionalities. It reduced the dominance of Adobe Flash in the industry, which used to be a prolific component for embedding multimedia in the web page. But HTML5 has no direct counterpart for some Flash capabilities; rather it works wonders when merged with CSS3 or JavaScript. One of the main features that brought in huge popularity for HTML5 was its ability to be implemented across multiple browsers and mobile devices.

History of the Standardization Process of HTML5:

2008 – Publication of the first working draft:

In 2008, the first working draft of the specifications of prospective HTML5 was published by WHATWG in public interest.

2011 – Last Call:

W3C created a full-fledged test suite and invited development communities to test and confirm the technical viability and soundness of the specifications.

2012 – Candidate Recommendation:

HTML5 was designated as a Candidate recommendation by W3C while WHATWG continued to work on the specifications of it as a ‘living standard’.

2014 – Final Release:

After its progression to a ‘Proposed Recommendation’ in September 2014, the specification process was completed in October that year and HTML5 was finally released as a stable W3C Recommendation.

New Features Introduced With HTML5:

1. Markup:

HTML5 is designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of its earlier versions. HTML brought new elements and attributes that empower today’s modern website usage. Some of the new tag elements are <span>, <nav>, <footer>, <audio> and <video> that emancipated the developers to a great extent. HTML5 put more emphasis on DOM scripting and also included Web forms 2.0.

2. New API’s:

HTML5 specified scripting several JavaScript supported API’s like Canvas, Microdata, Drag-and-Drop, Web messaging, MIME, Offline, Timed Media Playback and many others.

HTML5 supported animation of web contents with incorporating CSS3 and JavaScript in the code.

3. XHTML5:

HTML5 is designed to comply with both HTML and XHTML specifications. XHTML5 is nothing but XML-serialized HTML5 data that is sent with one XML type of media.

4. Improved Error Handling:

HTML5 is designed in such a way that the new constructs of HTML5 can be ignored without any problem by old browsers. For Lexing and parsing, HTML5 specifications give comprehensive rules.

Growing Popularity of HTML5:

Majority of the web application developers at world’s top-notch companies have adopted HTML5 to develop their corporate websites. If not completely, almost every platform now implements HTML5 at least partially.

Journey of HTML5:

1. After Firefox 3 allowed HTML5 to be viewed in its browser, Chrome, Safari and IE followed the trend and became HTML5 compatible.
2. YouTube dumped Adobe Flash and introduced HTML5 based video player.
3. In an open letter, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs discarded the future viability of Flash owing to HTML5’s ability to fill in the gap of multimedia web content requirements.
4. The famous online document-sharing website Scribd switched its base platform to HTML5.
5. With a major hit in the non-Apple applications arena, Google Chrome developed its Chrome store in HTML5.
6. Pandora moved its audio player to be developed in HTML5.
7. Amazon developed the web version of the Kindle reader with HTML5.
8. Twitter renovated its iPad presence with an HTML5 scripted version.
9. Adobe stopped release of flash for mobile devices.
10. Within 90 days of its release, HTML5 was adopted by over one million websites.
11. HTML5 emerged as the new standard in interactive marketing, as announced by Interactive Advertisement Bureau(IAB).
12. Facebook moved to HTML5 instead of Flash for all its videos.

Conclusion:

In an era of burgeoning device capabilities, no other technology has until now managed to match the level of unifying development experience that HTML5 has offered over these years. Though HTML5 has a very powerful premise, it is yet to mark its dominance felt in the development arena of certain applications like employee base mobile apps, which access the organization’s data. With an emergence of native mobile app development platforms, the future of HTML5 in the section may look hazy. But according to the pioneers, both of these are going to co-exist. The native mobile platforms are expected to have some edge over HTML5.

Though most of HTML5’s features are now being supported by majority of browsers, some are yet to be adopted. HTML5 Developers are constantly pushing HTML5 to make the web development with HTML more rewarding and to make the end-product offer better user experience.