Seminar report on HTML5

Minimal basics to know about  HTML5
HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (originally created in 1990 and most recently standardized as HTML4 in 1997) and as of August 2011 is still under development (Draft Mode).

Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML4, but XHTML1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript) as well.

In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactical features.

• These include the <video>, <audio>, <header>  and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of SVG content. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia  and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs.
• Other new elements, such as <section>, <article>, <header>, and <nav>, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents. New attributes have been introduced for the same purpose, while some elements and attributes have been removed.
• Some elements, such as <a>, <cite> and <menu>  have been changed, redefined or standardized. The APIs and DOM are no longer afterthoughts, but are fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification.
• HTML5 also defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents, so that syntax errors will be treated uniformly by all conforming browsers and other user agents.

Q: Why suddenly  It came into the picture?
Ans: The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) began work on the new standard in 2004, when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was focusing future developments on XHTML 2.0, and HTML 4.01 had not been updated since 2000.  In 2009, the W3C allowed the XHTML 2.0 Working Group's charter to expire, and decided not to renew it. W3C and WHATWG are currently working together on the development of HTML5.

Even though HTML5 has been well known among web developers for years, it became the topic of mainstream media in April 2010 after Apple Inc's CEO Steve Jobs issued a public letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" where he concludes that with the development of HTML5, Adobe Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. This sparked a debate in web development circles where some suggested that while HTML5 provides enhanced functionality developers must consider the varying browser support of the different parts of the standard as well as other functionality differences between HTML5 and Flash.

Many new APIs have been introduced too or extended the existing one:

• drag and drop
• canvas mode for 2D drawing
• document editing
• offline storage database (offline web applications)
• time media playback
• File API
• MIME Type
• Browser History Management

This seminar report was presented by Ms. Sreerekha J. of  2007-2011 Comuter Science Batch from SOE, CUSAT and was guided by Mr. Sudheep Elayidom.