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What about HTML 5?

by David Stanley    

There won't be an HTML5?

HTML was originally designed for a very different environment than today's very demanding hi-tech Internet. It was basically setup for the exchange of data and documents between locations. HTML coding has been distorted in many ways creating ill formed markup making it hard for some browsers (and other Internet applications) to make sense of it. After such a long time of abuse, there is a strong need of an extensible and portable coding.

XML is a structured set of rules for how one might define any kind of data to be shared on the Web. It's called "extensible" because anyone can invent a particular set of markup for a particular purpose. As long as everyone uses it (the writer and an application program at the receiver's end), it can be adapted and used for many purposes including describing the appearance of a Web page.

The immediate issue was to facilitate a transition from HTML to XML. Thus XHTML was created. XHTML is, in fact, the follow-on version of HTML 4.01. You could think of it as HTML 5, except that it is called XHTML 1.0. All HTML 4.01 markup tags and attributes will continue to be used and supported in XHTML.

With HTML, authors had a fixed set of elements to use with no variation. XHTML can be extended by anyone that uses it. New tags and attributes can be defined and added to those that already exist. This makes it possible to create new ways of embedding content in a web page. Authors can mix and match known HTML 4.01 elements with elements from other XML languages, including those developed by W3C for multimedia.