Smashing Mobile Web Development

HTML

Prior to HTML5, the standard HTML specification was dated December 24, 1999. The version was 4.01; however, most people just call it HTML. HTML5 has changed the whole landscape of web browsing. HTML5 brings new features to developers that were not available previously via a native browser. For example, development technologies, such as Flash, enable you to deliver things like video and interactive forms to the consumer. HTML5 you can use special tags to bring video to your webpage, without requiring the user have Flash on their device. This works well for iOS Mobile Devices, which do have Flash installed on their devices. The other benefits is that you don’ t have to learn a new language to put video on your website, you can just use the HTML5 <video> tag.

HTML 5 introduces new attributes and elements that help define HTML documents through semantic tags. Prior to this point, anyone reading just the tags of an actual HTML document would not know where the header or the footer is. HTML 5 changes this by adding header, footer, and content tags that are easy to access and read by browsers and consumers.

In addition to semantic tags, HTML 5 brings other new features to the user in the form of databases, geolocation, and enhanced caching. These allow developers to access more features of the mobile device than they could in previous versions of HTML. And because HTML 5 is now standard, it is accessible from almost every mobile web browser.

Key HTML5 features

While there are a ...