Introduction: A New Standard for Interactive Web

Many things about our internet experience have changed since HTML4 was first introduced in 1997. At the timeHTML4 was introduced, the majority of the websites were made up of simple static pages. With the advent of faster broadband, most websites these days use a number of web applications offering multimedia and dynamic experiences, like video, audio and interactive games. These interactive applications are not directly supported by HTML4. They require added plugins like Flash or QuickTime to operate.  Dynamic websites depend heavily on special backend scripts like Php or complex clientside scripts like JavaScript to create an interactive user experience. All of these things can be a drain on bandwidth and slow down the web experience. It is also very complex to design and implement.

HTML5 incorporates many of these aspects of the dynamic web, but in a much more efficient way. For example, instead of using special plugins like Flash or QuickTime, HTML5 introduces a single standard for posting multimedia content on your website.  In the case of video content, all you have to do is use the new <video> tag in HTML5 to embed a video file. Similarly many of the interactive features that would have required extensive scripts can now be created using standard HTML5 tags and simple scripts. You will learn more about these in depth in the tutorials.

Another thing that has changed since HTML4 was first introduced is the number of different devices that can now display websites. Back in 1997 a website was typically displayed on a standard computer screen. Now, along with the standard desktop or laptop screens there are several devices of different screen sizes which can display websites such as smartphones like, iphone, Droid, Blackberry etc., and tablets like, ipad. With HTML4 the markup has to be specifically written for a different device. As you can imagine this can be quiet a hassle to create different webpages to display on different screen sizes. HTML5 makes the process easier by creating a single standard for all devices.