As is natural there’s been a lot of excitement about the potential and promise of HTML5 and CSS3 but what exactly are they and what’s all the fuss over? One reason for the abundance of buzz around the two is that they’re both major revisions to the core markup and style sheet languages of the World Wide Web. HTML is the most widely used markup language of the web and provides the means to create structured documents and allows us to embed images, objects and interactive forms into our web pages and much more. CSS defines how to display html objects with regards to the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language, such as HTML, both are fundamental technologies for building web pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the maintainer of both CSS and HTML standards and compliance to these standards represents professionalism, makes for easy maintenance, the spread of good practice and is a quality stamp of a web developer’s work. Naturally Big Dot Media being a professional and quality company have excellent compliance.
HTML5 is currently in the working draft state and it will be as long as 12 years before it reaches the final W3C Recommendation stage, although parts of HTML5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before this full completion date and many parts are stable as we speak. A number of deprecated elements and presentational tags have been dropped however some of the most notable things HTML5 brings include new ways to present multimedia. Other new notable features of HTML5 include:
- Support for inline Mathematical Markup Language for describing mathematical notations.
- New elements such as <video>, <audio>, <header>, <footer>, <canvas> and many more.
- New types of form controls such as time, email and URL, many of which are currently stable and usable in the latest browsers.
- New attributes and Global attributes.
This is just a snippet and the possibilities are very exciting for web developers, which in turn will transcend gracefully into the design of new websites. Ultimately HTML5 allows new techniques and ways to provide enhanced functionality, which currently inhibits developers due to the current constraints of the HTML language. I believe that the most important part about this new wave of standards is that it will eventually eclipse the need to use propriety rich internet application via plugins, pushing open standards that could potentially reshape the way that video is manipulated, used and deployed. Adoption of open standards, especially regarding video has many benefits especially for browser and platform providers, the biggest dead weight slowing the movement towards such standards are the three big names behind the current major RIA’s which are Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle. However, Microsoft has already joined the HTML5 board and Adobes CEO expressed his acknowledgement of its significance, if not reluctantly.
CSS3 is fundamentally a reworked means of delivering impressive and impacting style to your HTML markup and web pages overall. The ultimate benefit for end clients is more impressive and radical new design features and for the developer the potential to achieve these new designs and in a much easier manner. It is also going to provide a means for on page transitions without the need to use scripting languages such as JavaScript which are often optionally blocked by users, lowering the user experience available to many. Even when using JavaScript for such effects, generally the web browser’s JavaScript rendering engine cannot keep up – this problem should not occur with CSS3!
CSS3 has been significantly compacted into many natural modules, each module offering new and exciting functionality including new text effects, borders, backgrounds, boxes, custom fonts, transitions and layers. What would have once been a tedious design task or not possible at all is made relatively easily achievable for the web developer in the form of CSS3. A lot of new examples of CSS3 are emerging all over the web and it’s all looking very fresh and will set new web 2.0 standards, so maybe it’s time to begin thinking how you can bring your site into life with these new technologies? Since generally it is far easier to ensure graceful degradation via these new technologies for those stubborn people who just won’t upgrade their Internet Explorer version!
The use of true type and open type fonts is one notable new feature and allows for the use of an extensive choice of web fonts. New interface features that used to be achieved in more complex languages such as box resizing are now conveniently placed in the developers CSS toolbox, as are looks achieved once in graphics software such as text and box shadows and gradients.
Most current browsers with an emphasis on Safari 4, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.5 and Google Chrome now support many new features available in the CSS3 and HTML5 specifications and examples of some of the features are emerging all over the web. So upgrade your browser and navigate the web looking for new design inspiration and seeking out some of the extra little something you may be able to add to your own web pages.
Leave a Reply
