Smashing Html5

Introduction

In 1992, I was stumbling the Internet (we used to stumble prior to surfing) with a program using the Gopher protocol. From El Paso, Texas, I was able to look up the train schedule between London and Cambridge in England. At the time, it was like a miracle. Here I was in West Texas with a London-Cambridge train schedule. Unbelievable!

Shortly after that time when I didn’t think it could get any better than Gopher on the Internet, up popped the Mosaic browser and the World Wide Web. Netscape Navigator soon supplanted Mosaic, and I discovered HTML. Now I was able to see graphics and text plus I could link to other Web pages. In short order, I worked out how to create my own Web pages using a text editor and the new markup language, HTML. Some of the guys in computer services set up a host for me, and I was in business.

For a while, it seemed that a new version of HTML was coming out every year or so. CSS and JavaScript were introduced and more and more browsers became available. It just kept getting better and better, but after HTML4 (in its many forms, including XHTML), things seemed to stagnate. This HTML Dark Ages lasted from about 2000 to 2008. Then the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the HTML5 Working Draft in 2008. However, after publication of the HTML5 standards in a draft format, everything was back to a crawl as far as getting my hands on an HTML5 browser. The team developing the standards has been methodical in the development process and was planning ...