HTML5 can benefit your business

You’ve probably seen many references to HTML5, along with mentions of certain features being “Deprecated” or “New” in HTML5. This can sometimes be confusing, as you find out that the way you thought you were “supposed” to do something is now not the right way at all.

It can also be annoying — especially since most of these “deprecated features” still work on most browsers. Why bother learning a new way of doing something if the old way works just fine?

This article should clear up some of that confusion and get you on the right track with modern web development.

 

HTML History and Development

HTML has been around for a long time. Its roots go back to at least 1980, with Tim Berners-Lee‘s project ENQUIRE. And actually, the concept of hypertext goes back even further than that. The concept first appeared in the early 1940s, and was named and demonstrated in the 1960s.

In 1989, Lee proposed a new hypertext system based on the ideas of ENQUIRE (and other systems, such as Apple’s HyperCard). This became the first version of what we now call HTML.

Since then, the language has been in constant development. The specification is managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (Berners-Lee is still the director, as of 2018), and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. (So, if you don’t like HTML5, these are the people to blame.)

The language has evolved over all this time because web development has changed. We do things with web pages and HTML today that were never dreamt of by the early developers and implementers of the language. A web page is no longer just a document; it is likely to be a full-scale web application. And even when it is “just a document,” we want search engines and other tools to understand the content of the website. We aren’t just creating pages for human readers anymore, but for artificially-intelligent systems that collect and manipulate information.

Why did HTML have to change? Because the web has changed.

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is a new version of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the standard programming language for describing the contents and appearance of web pages. HTML5 was created to solve the compatibility problem that affects the current standard, HTML4. HTML5 has been designed to deliver almost everything you would want to do online without requiring additional software such as browser plugins. It is the fundamental technology behind everything you see in a web browser, and it's used to build everything from simple web pages to complex web applications and services.

It does everything from animation to apps, music to movies, and can also be used to build incredibly complicated applications that run in your browser.

One of the ways HTML5 can benefit your business is Good Page Ranking. If the foundation of your business website is not semantically accurate (i.e unreadable, non-standard based code, then the page itself will not attain a good rank within search engines.No amount of Content Marketing in conjunction with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will make a difference to rankings if your page is not well structured HTML, easily readable by the Search Engine, in a logical document structure.