HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a hypertext markup language used primarily for creating documents on the Internet. HTML began its journey in the early 90’s as a primitive language for creating web pages, and today it is difficult to imagine the Internet without HTML. The vast majority of sites use HTML in one way or another.
In 2014, work was officially completed on a new standard – HTML5, which actually revolutionized, bringing a lot of new things to HTML.
What exactly has HTML5 brought?
- HTML5 defines a new parsing algorithm for creating DOM structure
- Adding new elements and tags, such as elements video, audio and a number of others
- Overriding rules and semantics of already existing HTML elements
In fact, with the addition of new features, HTML5 has become not just a new version of the markup language for creating web pages, but actually a platform for creating applications, and its use has gone far beyond the web environment: HTML5 is also used to create mobile applications for Android. iOS, Windows Mobile and even for creating desktop applications for ordinary computers (in particular, in Windows 8 / 8.1 / 10).
As a result, as a rule, HTML 5 is used mainly in two meanings:
- HTML 5 as an updated hypertext markup language, some development from the previous version of HTML 4
- HTML 5 as a powerful platform for building web applications that includes not only the hypertext markup language itself, updated HTML, but also the JavaScript programming language and CSS 3 cascading style sheets.
Who is in charge of HTML5 development? This is the responsibility of the World Wide Web Consortium (abbreviated as W3C – World Wide Web Consortium) – an independent international organization that defines the HTML5 standard in the form of specifications. The current full specification in English can be viewed at https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ . And it should be noted that the organization continues to work on HTML5, releasing updates to the specification.
Browser support
It should be noted that there has always been a gap between the HTML5 specification and the use of this technology in web browsers. Most browsers started adopting HTML5 standards even before they were officially published. And by now, most of the latest browser versions support most of the HTML5 functionality (Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge). At the same time, many older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 8 and lower versions, do not support standards, and IE 9, 10 only partially supports it.
However, even those browsers that generally support standards may not support specific features. And this must also be taken into account in the work. But in general, the situation with the support of this technology is quite good.
To check HTML5 support for a particular browser, you can use the special service http://html5test.com .
Required tools
What is required to work with HTML5? First of all, a text editor to type the text of web pages in html. One of the simplest and most popular text editors so far is Notepad ++ , which can be found at http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ . Its advantages include free, html tag highlighting. In the future, I will focus on this text editor.
Also worth mentioning is the cross-platform text editor Visual Studio Code . This editor has slightly more capabilities than Notepad ++, and in addition, it can work not only in Windows, but also in MacOS and Linux-based operating systems.
And you also need a web browser to run and check the written web pages. As a web browser, you can take the latest version of any of the common browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera.