Today, while reading an interesting blog post, I was called a geek.  I was so upset by this shameless finger pointing (the blog brazenly suggested that because I was reading the article in the first place I must be a geek), that I left the site. OK, so I may have been specifically interested in using multiple CSS styles for different devices and configurations, but that’s beside the point!

Anyway, back to the matter at hand and I decided that while I might be a little bit geeky, that doesn’t mean I understand all tekkie jargon. So, I thought that once in a while, I would take some tekkie speak and translate it into plain English for those of you who like to read about geeky things but might not necessarily be a geek!

Today, I want to talk about HTML5. It’s being talked about a lot at the moment and if you read the post ‘Web design and the iPad’ you would have come across it.

To give you a bit of background, HTML ( which stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the predominant and universal markup language for web pages) was developed by the W3C  (the World Wide Web Consortium) until 2004, when members of the HTML working group became unhappy with the direction the W3C was going with HTML. They felt that the W3C was not paying enough attention to the real-world development needs of the language and focusing too much on XML and XHTML. So they formed a new group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) devoted to evolving the Web. They started by working on a new specification of HTML – HTML 5.

HTML5  incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears. This is important because, as you may have heard, Apple is no longer compatible with Flash, choosing instead to adopt HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

Here is a brilliant explanation in the form of an infographic…