The good news is that you don’t have to wait for it – it’s here already, and is making quite a splash. It’s a little thing called HTML5, and, lashed together with it’s dynamic duo sidekick CSS3, it’s looking to become the new “standard” upon which websites and mobile applications will be built in the years ahead.
We know, we know…you’re still trying to recover from the shocking news that Adobe will no longer support Flash for mobile devices. Maybe you’re scratching your head over why yet another shift in standards is occurring when XHTML seemed so good. Well, here are five reasons why you may want to take a serious look at committing your next web project to HTML5.
Not to be shallow, but who among us is brave enough to take a divergent path away from the one already embraced by Google, Apple and Microsoft…and a host of other notable designers, software developers and manufacturers.
As HTML5 evolves, it will only help the search engines to parse content that much more effectively. With tags that are shorter and specific to the type of content being served, the Google & Co. spiders will have a lot less difficulty trying to figure out what us designers meant.
Great features are already available, like editable content, built-in form validation, local storage, placeholders, auto-focus, and audio/video playback without plug-ins to name a few. Count on hundreds of new features and additions springing up as more developers make the jump across the fence in the months ahead.
The major browsers all do just fine supporting HTML5. Right now. So, no need to cling to the older standard(s) for fear it is going to cost big money to make the change.
HTML5 is poised to minimize the “development distance” between the browser-based and mobile worlds, and that’s good news for everyone.
So there it is. We’ve seen the future HTML5 is delivering…and it is going to be VERY GOOD.
