Blog post written by Coert van den Thillaart. Coert is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is since 2004 active in the middleware area (EAI, SOA, EDA etc.) at Accenture Netherlands.

Over the last year you may have heard of HTML 5. Within the IT community there is a lot of buzz surrounding it. The most prominent is probably Apple no longer wanting to support Flash on their mobile devices in favor of HTML 5. So what is it and why should you care?

Let’s start with the boring background. HTML (the HyperText Markup Language) is the language that is used for webpages. It’s a fairly simple and limited text markup language. The hypertext name comes from the ability to use hyperlinks to jump to other parts in the text or other pages. The HTML ‘code’ is parsed by the browser and that results in the webpages we all know and love. HTML originated in 1993 and has been the de-facto standard for pages on the web. While initially the standard developed quite frequently, the latest version (4.01) was released in 1999. So the last update was 12 years ago. An update seemed long overdue.

HTML has mostly been focussed on text and labelling the contents to allow for easy reference. Apart from text the HTML spec also allowed for images and “objects”. With the popularity of the web and it’s various uses the text focus proved more and more limiting. Through various plug-ins some of the HTML limitations have been overcome (with Flash being the most popular). However with these plug-ins additional requirements were added to the browser that needed to display page. This resulted in a growing dependency on what specific browser you were using. This, on it’s turn, resulted in a movement back towards the formal HTML specification and associated webstandards to regain the freedom for the user to choose what browser to use. However using no plug-ins showed (again) that HTML itself does have it’s limitations and with more and more functionality moving to the web an update was really needed.

With HTML 5 this update is finally here. When referring to HTML 5 usually more than just HTML 5 is meant. HTML 5 is used to indicate the new HTML 5, CSS3 and Javascript specifications. So, what kind of changes is HTML 5 bringing that make it so relevant.

• The best known example is the addition of the video tag. With this tag it’s now possible to display video without the need of an extra plugin like Flash or Silverlight. With the popularity of video on the web this step greatly simplifies the requirements for adding video to a webpage. There is downside however, the browser will not display just any videoformat. It needs to support the one provided on the page. This has caused some new rivalry amongst browser vendors but hopefully this will be resolved quickly.

• The next major addition comes from javascript. And it enables webcontent to be stored locally and offline. This is useful because it allows online applications to continue functioning even when your (mobile) internet connection is down. This means continuing reading your mail, editing your blog or viewing your calendar when there is no connection. When your connection is restored your offline copy will be synced with the online one so you will be able to continue your work on any other platform.

• There is also a major improvement on the text front. HTML 5 (or CSS3 to be exact) now allows for custom fonts to be displayed on webpages. Before HTML 5 if you wanted to display text in a certain font that font needed to be installed on the user’s computer. This severely limited the options for website developers. Basically they were confined to a very basic set of system fonts. This limitation also became apparent in online document editors that had the same limitation. It would take too much time to go into all the new changes here but they are plentiful. If you want a good overview check out the following website that is completely built in HTML 5: http://slides.html5rocks.com. Be sure to open it in a HTML 5 compatible browser though.

HTML 5 is enabling HTML to catch up to progressively online world we live in. It allows a better compatibility of online applications across platforms. With smartphones, tablets and even tv’s going online this cross-compatibility is far more relevant than it used to be. Interestingly enough the HTML 5 adoptation has been stronger in mobile devices than on desktop devices. All major mobile platforms already support HTML 5 and have done so for the last year, but only recently Microsoft released it’s first fully compatible desktop browser (IE9). HTML 5 seems to be the definitive breakthrough in making sure browsers will follow the standard. Enabling users to view content on the browser of choice. Be it on a desktop computer, a gaming console, a smartphone or a tablet. Any HTML 5 compliant browser will provide them with the same feature rich functionality they expect.

So why is HTML5 relevant for you?