HTML, an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, is the primary coding language behind web pages and applications. HTML uses a set of key words called tags wrapped in angled brackets. HTML tags generally appear in pairs, the first one is called an opening tag and the second one is the closing tag, although there are a select few elements such as the image tag, that only have the opening tag. The web browser reads these tags and composes the visual document for the user. HTML documents are almost always accompanied by Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) documents to format the visual appearance for pages to improve the users viewing pleasure.
HTML has been the web standard from the early 1990′s with the first publicly available description of HTML being cited in a document by Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the World Wide Web technology. From its birth back in the 1990′s, HTML has seen many standards amendments, with HTML 4.0 being the latest revision published by the world Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in late 1997 and updated in April 1998 and again in December 1999 with minor amends taking the version to 4.01.
Since December ’99 there has been no significant change of the HTML specification by the W3C, who were focusing their efforts on a variant of HTML, XHTML 2.0, which is an extension of the HTML standard and utilizes the XML framework to create documents. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the HTML 5 specification in 2004. In 2009 the W3C decided to suspend work on XHTML 2.0 and joined WHATWG on the development of HTML 5.
HTML 5 is envisioned to include elements of both HTML 4.01 and XML, to create a single markup language that can be written with either HTML or XHTML syntax. It has also been designed to extend and improve the variety of markup available in web documents to help progress coding standards and deliver more semantic, and humanly readable, code. Many features of HTML5 have been built with mobile devices, such as Iphones, in mind to help bridge the gap between desktop and mobile browsing experiences.
With HTML 5 comes new markup tags and web APIs to allow developers to do more on their sites. These APIs including the Canvas and Drag-and-Drop interface are intended to help reduce the need for web browser plugins, for instance, the canvas tag can handle things that normally require Adobe’s flash to do. The HTML 5 specification also drops previously deprecated tags such as the “font” and “center” tags altogether in favour of newer tags such as span and div which can do the same job with less code bloat.
Not all media coverage of the HTML 5 specification has been encouraging, with the new Data Storage API being under fire over its security and having the potential for hackers to be able to access saved data in the API’s Data Store. Another point to note is the fact that some older-but-still-popular web browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer series version 8 and below will not support the majority of the HTML 5 specification and with latest version of the browser being unavailable to people using their still popular Windows XP operating system, such as government bodies, it is clear there is still a long way to go before HTML 5 becomes the next web standard.
This means there is still plenty of time for Microsoft to catch up and release a browser for all OS versions that supports the specification, as well as the CSS3 Specification.
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