Technology | DOI: 10.1145/2209249.2209256
htmL5 Leads
a Web Revolution

Propelled by a proliferation of mobile devices and social networks, an enhanced family of Web specifications is bringing new power to developers and new capabilities to users.

DeVeLoPers of sof TwAre for the World Wide Web say the new HTML5 standard is revolu- tionizing the way the Web evolves, works, and is used. It is simplifying the work of programmers, harmonizing access to diverse devices and applications, and giving users amazing new capabilities, they say. Yet, HTML, the Hyper Text Markup Language, is just a way to tag parts of a document so that Web browsers can deal with them intelligently.

How could a humble mechanism for tagging Web pages have such a big impact? Is the hype surrounding the fifth version of HTML just a lot of geeky noise? And why should computer professionals care about it, anyway? The hype is justified; the difficulty lies in the definition because HTML5 is both a single specification and a whole set of technologies.

While the markup language has

for more than two decades remained at the core of Web software, HTML5 is most often thought of broadly to include new versions of the markup language itself and its associated standard for accessing and manipulating HTML documents, the Document Object Model; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a language to define the presentation and appearance of an HTML document; and the JavaScript scripting language. The term is often used even more broadly to include specific application programming interfaces (APIs), such as those that enable new browser-based graphics, geolocation, local storage, and video capabilities.

And HTML5 is at the heart of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Open Web Platform, an umbrella term that changes over time and that refers to the markup language and various technologies that pertain to it.

 

thanks to htmL5, developers can now enable transparent access to geolocation information without having to write separate code for each browser and device.

Gary Anthes

Indeed, the popular definition of
HTML has expanded and matured as
the Internet has grown more powerful
and its reach has increased, says Ian Ja-
cobs, editor of the W3C’s HTML4 recom-
mendations and other standards. “The
Web over 20 years has developed from
a Web of more-or-less static documents
to, now, a platform for applications.”
There are two driving forces behind
this evolution, Jacobs says. First is the
proliferation of diverse devices that,
coupled with the variety of browsers,
greatly complicate life for developers,
who want to “write once and deploy ev-
erywhere.” Second, he says, “the Web
has now embraced the social network-
ing model, and when you can tap into
that, you can reach many more custom-
ers.” In some cases, hundreds of mil-
lions of more customers.

a Developer-Friendly standard

Ocupop, a graphics and Web design and marketing firm, has begun using HTML5 for all its Web work. Not all of the highly touted features in the umbrella standard are strictly speaking “new,” says Matthew McVickar, a Web developer and usability designer at Ocupop. “They are codifications of techniques used in the past. It takes stuff that developers were trying to do, or wanted to do, and made them into stuff that’s natively supported in the browser.” For example, he says, HTML5 has a standard JavaScript interface for geolocation, so that a Web browser on a mobile device can access GPS data without invoking a custom-written API to a GPS device or application.

That may not be apparent to the end user, but it is a big deal for software developers. Developers can, by writing to HTML5, enable transparent access to geolocation information without having to write separate code for each