Engagement/Developer Engagement/Grab bag/HTML5

HTML5 is the technology stack that drives the web. It consists of various parts: HTML markup, which is describing what a certain part of a document is, CSS3 which defines the look and feel (and interaction using animations and transitions) and JavaScript which defines the interactivity of what we create.

• HTML5 is partly a misnomer. The old versions of HTML did nothing else but add meaning to text content by giving it semantic value, linking and including other files like images, objects (in most cases flash movies), sound, video and style sheets. The HTML5 standard now includes a lot of information about JavaScript interfaces for web sites and most importantly a "how to build a HTML5 compliant browser".
• HTML5 is defined in a joint effort by the WHATWG working group (which includes a lot of browser vendors) and the W3C. The WHATWG runs the wild innovation part of HTML5 - not everything that is in their specification will make it into the final one. The W3C effort is more conservative and therefore more interesting for an enterprise market.
• HTML5 is open - you learn by viewing the source code of others. This also means it is up to us to write clean HTML5 to set a good example and base to work from.
• HTML5 is interoperable - products built with it are meant to run on a large variety of hardware. Therefore not all best practices we have on desktop apply to it.
• HTML5 is meant to be backwards compatible - old browsers that do for example not understand the new form elements should offer a normal text field as the means of entering the information.