HTML 5 – The latest standard to HTML is rapidly being used nowadays to create a number of websites. Although the foundation of HTML 5 was laid way back in 2004, it came in to the limelight when Adobe announced that it will halt the development of Flash for mobile browsers in 2011.
How different is HTML 5 from HTML?
If you think that HTML 5 is something highly complicated, then you are hugely mistaken. It is basically the plain old HTML accompanied by Javascript and CSS3. Also, HTML 5 contains new and improved elements and attributes, offers full CSS3 support, easy to use audio/video tags, 2D/3D support, web storage, local SQL database, web app and a special type of media element called Canvas. These small but significant changes are the main factors that distinguish HTML 5 from its predecessors.
What is the need for HTML 5?
There are certain reasons which make HTML 5’s presence a necessity even for a layman’s point of view. These reasons are – an ever growing number of smartphone and tablet users who use their devices to access the internet, support from leading companies, rich features and functionalities, multimedia support and its simplicity.
All these reasons along with various advantages make HTML 5 a complete package for creating websites, which can be accessed from any device.
Main advantages of HTML 5
• Reduces the need for external plug-ins, which was not the case with Flash. This means you need not download any plug-ins in order to view a multimedia object or using interactive elements on a web page.
• Device independent and offers cross-platform compatibility. This means you can run HTML 5 based websites on any device.
• Compatible with almost all the latest web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, IE 9, Google Chrome, Safari etc. This means you needn’t open any particular browser to view certain websites.
• It is the future of web apps owing to its responsive design features.
These are some main advantages of HTML 5. However, like a coin that has two sides, it has its share of disadvantages as well. Let us take a look at some of the disadvantages of HTML 5.
Disadvantages of HTML 5.
• Since HTML 5 is still in the “development phase”, there can be some issues when it comes to redesigning a particular website.
• The current HTML 5 version provides very poor browser support. This is one of its grey areas and developers are working on it.
• It is true that the latest browsers do support HTML 5. But what about those who are still using older versions of the same browsers (which do not support HTML 5).
All these above mentioned information formed the crux of HTML 5. If you want to know in-depth about it from a developer’s point of view, you can check different sites, which teach how to the HTML 5 script. Trust me, the more you will know about this wonderful web standard, the more you will be amazed by it!