BANGALORE, INDIA: The buzz around HTML 5 is getting louder by the day. Most major browsers have already started supporting it, and many companies have already embedded it in their websites. It's time you also started exploring its capabilities before everyone gets on the bandwagon and leaves you behind. Here, we discuss everything about its features and capabilities.

Who is behind HTML5?
HTML5 is a decentralized concept and is promoted by WHATWG (Web hypertext Application technology working group). This group was formed in June 2004 after a disagreement within the W3C group due to the deviation in ideas of some members from HTML to XHTML. And many top people from Mozilla, Google and Apple did not want to leave HTML as a standard and hence they formed WHATWG.

HTML5's development started in 2004 and is not released yet. But few browsers have already started supporting it so you can play around with its new features. HTML5 is no doubt one of the most talked about buzz word on Internet today and it claims to change the way web applications are developed by making them stronger.

Features at a glance
Doctype: HTML5 suggested the removal of various doctypes and recommends sticking to the following.

Generic structure of a webpage: Almost every website has very similar page structure viz header, navigation (also called menu), content section and the footer.  HTML5 has them defined as generic tags, so that every time a new webpage is created, you do not have to define the div, span, id, class etc for these portions of the webpage.

New Controls: With the advent of HTML5 some new controls are introduced. These are the controls which are commonly used on a webpage, but at present a developer has to write code for them on each & every webpage he develops.

Less error prone code: As mentioned above, there are a few new controls which are there by default in HTML5, such that a developer does not have to write a code for it. This results in making a web application more robust as a developer has to write less number of lines of code compared to what he used to write before HTML5. We will illustrate this later through examples.