HTML5

HTML5
Filename extension
.html, .htm
Internet media type
text/html
Type codeTEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)public.html[1]
Developed by
Initial release22 January 2008
(16 years ago) (2008-01-22)[2]
Latest release
5.2 (Second revision)
14 December 2017
(6 years ago) (2017-12-14)[3]
Type of formatMarkup language
Extended fromHTML4, XHTML1, DOM2 HTML
Extended toHTML LS
StandardHTML 5.2
Open format?Yes
HTML
Comparisons

HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final[4] major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML Living Standard. It is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a consortium of the major browser vendors (Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft).

HTML5 was first released in a public-facing form on 22 January 2008,[2] with a major update and "W3C Recommendation" status in October 2014.[5][6] Its goals were to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia and other new features; to keep the language both easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices such as web browsers, parsers, etc., without XHTML's rigidity; and to remain backward-compatible with older software. HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4 but also XHTML1 and even the DOM Level 2 HTML itself.[7]

HTML5 includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves, and rationalizes the markup available for documents and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications.[8] For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a candidate for cross-platform mobile applications because it includes features designed with low-powered devices in mind.

Many new syntactic features are included. To natively include and handle multimedia and graphical content, the new <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements were added; expandable sections are natively implemented through <summary>...</summary> and <details>...</details> rather than depending on CSS or JavaScript; and support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) content and MathML for mathematical formulas was also added. To enrich the semantic content of documents, new page structure elements such as <main>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <nav>, and <figure> are added. New attributes were introduced, some elements and attributes were removed, and others such as <a>, <cite>, and <menu> were changed, redefined, or standardized. The APIs and Document Object Model (DOM) are now fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification,[8] and HTML5 also better defines the processing for any invalid documents.[9]

  1. ^ "Mac Developer Library: System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers". Apple. 17 November 2009.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference HTML5v1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference HTML52 History was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference W3C transfer ZDNet was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference finalars was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ "HTML5 is a W3C recommendation". W3C Blog. World Wide Web Consortium. 28 October 2014. Retrieved 28 October 2014.
  7. ^ "HTML5 Differences from HTML4". W3.org. W3C. Introduction. Retrieved 2 March 2018. HTML4 became a W3C Recommendation in 1997. While it continues to serve as a rough guide to many of the core features of HTML, it does not provide enough information to build implementations that interoperate with each other and, more importantly, with Web content. The same goes for XHTML1, which defines an XML serialization for HTML4, and DOM Level 2 HTML, which defines JavaScript APIs for both HTML and XHTML. HTML replaces these documents.
  8. ^ a b "HTML5 Differences from HTML4". W3.org. W3C. 19 October 2010. Retrieved 4 December 2010.
  9. ^ "HTML 5.2 W3C Recommendation". W3.org. W3C. 14 December 2017. § 1.10.2 Syntax Errors. Retrieved 29 June 2017.