What is HTML5?

HTML5 is supposed to be what HTML should have been in the first place.

The first web browser, Mosaic, was introduced in 1993. A year later Netscape, based on Mosaic, was introduced and the net began to become popular. HTML was used in both browsers, but there was no "standard" HTML until the introduction of HTML 2.0.

Mosaic wikipedia

HTML 2.0 was first published in 1995.* HTML 3.0 was published two years later and 4.01 two years after that. HTML 4.01 has been the work horse of the net ever since.

Netscape wikipedia

The first "working draft" of HTML5 was published in January of 2008 and it already has surprisingly broad browser support. However HTML5 is a long way from being fully implemented. There are any number of planning committees that have plans to make it a "recommendation", but such plans are still in the planning phase – and don't plan on that changing anytime soon.

Two groups, the W3C and the WHATWG, are in charge of developing HTML5. Why two groups? "The WHATWG was formed in response to the slow development of web standards monitored by the W3C." wikipedia – In other words they got in a fight and parted ways.

They say they have since kissed and made up. Both groups agree that it's going to take ten years to fully implement HTML5, though it will be in wide use long before then – assuming that, like eColi, they don't divide and multiply again.

Many on the boards of W3C and WHATWG work for competing browser companies. Inevitably conflicts of interest, not to mention MS's brutal attempt in the late 1990s to control it all (wikipedia), have provoked problems, but I will admit – abet begrudgingly, that on the whole they have done a reasonably good job.

At the moment HTML5 is not all that different from 4.01. Certain tags, such as the<font> tag, that were "depreciated" (but usually worked) in HTML 4.01, don't work in HTML5. There are a number of other odds and ends, but they tidy up old messes rather than introduce fundamental changes. That will happen with the coming of new APIs and the tags that implemented them.

For example, if you want to add video to your page now you either have to add a complicated script to your page, have to open it in a separate application such as Windows Media Player or embed a YouTube video. The former is not easy and the later two lack professional polish. HTML5 will have a new tag, the <video> tag, and an associated API that will solve that problem.

The <video> tag will give the internet the tool it needs to distribute television to everyone. Right now in Firefox 3.5 you can see a prototype onhttp://www.w3.org/2009/04/video-player.xhtml.** By the time you read this other browsers might support it as well.

APIs running in new tags will give us the ability do things we can't even imagine at this point. They will change everything, but short of that HTML5 shouldn't be all that different from its predecessors. Let's hope not. It's going to be hard enough to get the APIs to work.

While it's nice to be ahead of the pack, for now HTML5 has no significant advantage over 4.01 or XHTML. However it won't stay that way forever.