Building Apps with HTML5: What You Need to Know

Brandon Satrom HTML5 is here, and the Web will never be the same. You’ve no doubt heard that before, or something like it. I’d guess that when you did, you got excited, rolled your eyes, or mouthed the word “why?” and furrowed your brow a bit. Perhaps your reaction was a mix of all three. I wouldn’t blame you for any of these. HTML5 is exciting, and it does have the potential to change the Web as we know it, but it also gets blown out of proportion. What’s more, its true meaning can be elusive. I’ve experienced each of those reactions myself while building applications with HTML5. It’s a broad topic, so it’s difficult to wrap your head around HTML5, much less know where to begin with this exciting new set of technologies. This is the first article in a series for MSDN Magazine, and the goal is to give you a complete picture of why the first sentence in this article is true—and important. Over the next several months, I want to help you understand what HTML5 means to you—both as a Web developer and as a developer who uses Microsoft tools and technologies. I hope to simplify some of the complexity around HTML5 for you, and demystify much of the hype. I’ll also introduce some HTML5 features that are available today, as well as some exciting technologies that, though a bit further out, are worth paying attention to. Finally, I’ll leave you with some tips that will help you adopt HTML5 technologies now, while you continue to provide great experiences to users with older browsers. If you’re excited about HTML5, I want to help you turn that excitement into ideas you can put into practice immediately. If you’re skeptical, I want to help you understand just why HTML5 is important. And if you’re just confused about what HTML5 even means, fear not: that’s our first stop in this series. What Is HTML5? You might have discovered by now that HTML5 means different things to different people. To some, it just means new tags like <header> and <footer> and a handful of new attributes available in markup. To others, it means everything that’s new and interesting on the Web, including technologies implemented in just a single browser or other specifications not officially part of HTML5. To be sure, understanding the real meaning of HTML5 is often the first roadblock many of us face. And, honestly, there’s some justification for the number of varying definitions. HTML5 is huge! Formally defined by an international standards body known as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), HTML5 consists of more than 100 specifications that relate to the next generation of Web technologies. By putting all 100-plus of these specifications under the moniker HTML5, you could argue that the W3C oversimplified things. And while it’s hard to take something as broad as HTML5 and define it in an unambiguous way, I believe that the W3C was trying to address the scope of what’s changing on the Web by introducing HTML5 as a unifying concept for that change. In fact, HTML5 is an umbrella term describing a set of HTML, CSS and JavaScript specifications designed to enable developers to build the next generation of Web sites and applications. What’s notable in that definition is its three parts: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They define how developers use improved markup, richer style capabilities and new JavaScript APIs to make the most of new Web development features. Simply put, HTML5 = HTML + CSS + JavaScript.