Tech Terminology Demystified – HTML5

HTML5 is the latest version of HTML, currently under development. HTML5 has some really amazing features that we will explore in this article. The first draft of HTML5 was released in 2008 and major browsers are beginning to incorporate HTML5 features. The final version of the standard is not yet released (and not expected to be released any time soon).

 


So, what are some of the interesting features of HTML5?

 

Video
You can play video on browsers without any codecs or third-party plug-ins. Currently, Adobe Flash Player is used widely to embed video on many sites including YouTube. Many web browsers have Adobe’s Flash Player pre-installed (with exceptions such as the browsers on the Apple iPhone and iPad and on Android 2.1 or less).

 

Geolocation
First, visit this location using at least Firefox 3.5 (support in the form of add-ons for previous versions also available). Amazing, is it not.

 

According to Mozilla,
“When you visit a location-aware website, Firefox will ask you if you want to share your location.

 

If you consent, Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address. Then Firefox sends this information to the default geolocation service provider, Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website.

 

If you say that you do not consent, Firefox will not do anything.”

 

Canvas
Try this and this for a superb demo of what canvas can do. The canvas element is a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes.

 

Web Workers
This is an API which lets browsers run threads in the background for a faster user experience. Web Workers allow you to do things like fire up long-running scripts to handle computationally intensive tasks, but without blocking the UI or other scripts to handle user interactions.

 

Application Cache
While building the site, the developer can specify the files that the browser should cache. In fact, on each page, you can specify which documents should be cached. So, even if you refresh the page when you are offline, the page will still load correctly. Google gears, which helps you access Gmail offline, is an implementation of HTML 5 specifications for Applications Cache (and much more). So, you get to browse your applications offline, browse them faster and with much less load on the server (the server will be polled to see if a newer file is available; if not, then the file will not be downloaded and the one from cache will be shown to you)

 

These are some of my favorite features from HTML5. Visit here to see some well made HTML5 websites.