HOW IT ALL STARTED

Once upon a time, when designing for the web started becoming a chore, hobby, or work for geeks…they were using the language known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). This is nothing new to us, but I’m going to spill out this fairy tale to put this lesson into some context before diving in deep.

It’s gone through many iterations, meaning…the language has been updated to fit the conditions of the internet as it has envolved. Before today’s new introduction of HTML5, there were several steps along the way:

…We had HTML 2.0 (1994)

…Then HTML 4.0 (1999)

…And finally what you all have been practicing over the last six weeks, xHTML 1.0 (2001)

The World As You Knew It

So you may be wondering, what was so special about the version of HTML that you have been coding with. Well, that little ‘x’ stands for eXtensible. It’s not all too different from it predecessor (HTML 4.0) other than the syntax – it had a stricter markup language that scores us folks some advantages:

1. Display web pages consistently across browsers, even across platforms, since browsers can respond and rely better on the stricter markup.
2. XHTML integrates well into other programming languages because it is XML.

Wow, so you would think that what you’ve been using was so great, huh? Well, so the proposed plan was to develop an even stricter version of xHTML, which would have been known as xHTML 2.0. However, you had representatives from Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer were unhappy with this. Why? Well…xHTML 2.0 would have been so different of a syntax that it was practically it’s own language. It wasn’t going to be backwards compatible. This is a big issue. The unhappy people from the industries I had named previously took the approach the future of the HTML should really be geared towards building web applications. When this idea was proposed at a workshop in 2004, it was rejected. And so…a special force was created called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).

The Birth of HTML5

OKAY. So yes, HTML5 – the work of WHATWG and the W3C HTML Working Group has shown its face as of 2007. BUT…it’s not exactly perfectly. To be honest with you, it’s still in development. Meaning, some browsers accept the new syntax as others only accept some of the new standards. The due date to have everything up and running perfectly is 2012.

So while we are getting our hands dirty in this stuff over the next few weeks, I would like to quote Jeremy Keith (author of HTML5 for Web Designers):

HTML5 isn’t a completely new language created from scratch. It’s an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in the ongoing story of markup. If you are currently creating websites with any version of HTML, you’re already using HTML5.

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