HTML5 in Action

Hypertext Markup Language is the fundamental building language of the web. HTML5 is one of the must-know skills for every web professional, whether front-end, back-end, or SEO expert. The fifth and the latest version of the markup language, it was released in October 2014 with W3C Recommendation status. The latest recommended version of HTML5 itself, at the time of this writing, is HTML5.2.

HTML5 is well-compatible with the advanced features of CSS3, and goes along well with ES6 too. Support for the latest version is provided by rendering engines of all major browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, and Firefox.

Features of HTML5

HTML5 has brought a swarm of new features to the Hypertext Markup Language. Most of them are supported by leading HTML preprocessors in use, namely Slim, Pug, Haml, Handlebars, Nunjucks and Macdom. Some of the features commonly utilized in front-end web development are:

Semantic elements

Instead of using a <div> element for every block of content, you can now structure the document semantically through new elements like <main>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <nav> etc. This is also a huge SEO advantage.

Multimedia Elements

With the introduction of the <video> and <audio> tags, designers no more have to use the <iframe> tag to render multimedia on the website. Features like enabling/disabling controls, mute on start, video loops, etc can be set.

Introduced elements

Apart from the new semantic and multimedia tags, several miscellaneous tags, attributes and input types have been introduced which are quite handy. For instance, <canvas>, <map>, <figure>, and <details> tags, data-* attribute, and form types such as datetime, range, email, url, and others.

Doomed elements

HTML5 has depreciated several tags such as <big>, <center>, <acronym>, <noscript>, <strike> and others. The definition of several others have been changed, such as the <small> tag which now denotes a small print.

Better Forms

Now you can add placeholders to the text fields to indicate the users what to enter there. Validation ensures that the users type the correct sort of information in each text field and the “required” attribute makes that input compulsory for form submission.

Editable content

Add the “contenteditable” attribute to any element such as <p> or <ul> to make it editable from user-end.

Browser Storage

Local storage and Session storage helps store user data temporarily in the browser which can be fetched and manipulated through scripts.

Cacheing

Webmasters can now specify which pages or file types should be cached by the browser for faster subsequent loads and offline browsing.

Geolocation

With HTML5, the web application can now make use of Geolocation API to track the user location and relevant information such as IP Address.

Using HTML5 with its modern preprocessors like Slim, Pug and Haml, we provide responsive website design and development services. Besides, all SEO recommendations within HTML5 are given due consideration as well. Sarvay Xenia also has hybrid mobile app developers who use HTML5 and CSS3 alongside Angular to develop your hybrid applications on Ionic.