HTML5 and Web Design

One of the biggest changes to the Internet in recent times is on the verge of completion, leading to an exciting time for web designers and web developers. HTML5 has been in development since 2004, and web designers are increasingly adopting it as they see the advantages in using this new standard in programming for websites. In this blog we’ll take a look at what it is and what it means for web designers.

For the best part of a decade, most web pages have been encoded using HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1, the complex series of <tags> you see when you open up the source code for a website. These standards have long been the dominant language for writing a website, but are becoming increasingly more difficult to synchronise with new technologies. Take, for example, the picture slide shows many websites have. To add one of these to a website using HTML 4.01, a web designer must use a third party application, like Flash, to put it into the website. HTML5 will simplify all this by offering inbuilt support for such tasks.

If you think of each program as a different language, the implications for web designers are obvious. Rather than learning a bunch of languages – HTML, Flash, Silverlight etc, designers can do everything they need to in HTML5, cutting back on time and effort significantly.

Another good example is video – embedding a YouTube clip in a HTML 4.01 website is a messy affair, while HTML5 offers its own video (and audio) playback service.

HTML5 is designed to make it easier to add things into websites that have developed or advanced since HTML 4 came around, including chat, wikis, discussion boards and drag-and-drop (the act of clicking on something and dragging it somewhere else) tools.

We’ll examine some more features of HTML5 in our next post.

Posted by: Sukhbir Mehla

No comments found.