And then HTML5 came along.
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| HTML5 FTW! |
I won't claim that it was love at the first sight, but once major browsers started getting their act together, things rapidly began falling into place. Today, I will be listing some of the various ways HTML5 has improved the web development experience of many web developers around the world.
Less code, more functionality
The days of me needing to write code to validate basic things in HTML were over. The type attribute in HTML5 input tags took care of all that. Things like the placeholder attribute also resulted in me not needing to write code for that particularly basic piece of functionality. And not to mention date widgets! |
| Fields have more functionality. |
This has resulted in a lot less code to maintain over various applications, while preserving the level of functionality, especially in HTML forms. From a programming point of view, you can't go wrong with getting more for less.
Syntax simplicity and consistency
Remember the days of declaring document headers for XHTML? That was a pain in the arse.<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
Now we have this...
<!doctype HTML>
...and come on, there's almost no way to screw that up.
HTML5 also came with the standard of making almost everything lowercase, and ensuring that every opening tag had a closing tags (with some tags being self-closing). It deprecated useless tags whose effects could have been replicated using CSS.
The plethora of new tags introduced such as the ones for article, aside and so on, were a challenge to remember. But they actually make the HTML easier to read than if everything was a div or a span tag. Multimedia no longer needed an object tag with multiple qualifiers and we could simply specify an audio or video tag.
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| Web media. |
And if we still required custom data, all we needed was something like data-customNameHere in a tag and we could just put in values as needed. This led to so much easier programming. All we had to do later was retrieve the data from a convenient data structure!
API Features
There are some entirely new API features in HTML5 such as the Canvas, Drag And Drop and Web Storage options. There are more, of course, but my limited usage of these have not exposed me to them as of yet. |
| Drag and drop. |
This made past challenges such as caching, easier to manage. And, as mentioned earlier, this has also resulted in less code needing to be written for these widely-used features.
Happy coding!
It's been almost 15 years since HTML5 entered the web industry. I remember the bad old days prior to its existence. Some with rose-tinted glasses and fond nostalgia, and some with shudders. I'm still learning as I go along. There is so much left to cover.HTML5 has been a boon to the industry. Long may it live, at least till it outlives its usefulness!
<bye />
T___T
T___T
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