The Advantages and Disadvantages of HTML5

The Advantages and Disadvantages of HTML5

HTML5 is the hottest thing in web development. In this article, I wanted to discuss the background surrounding HTML5 development and point to the advantages and disadvantages to using the language today. I'm going to write a more detailed series in the future, detailing specific elements of the language as well as practical examples of the language.

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is the newest version of the HyperText Markup Language that was developed in the late 80's in order to describe documents that linked to each other. In it's early days, HTML's role was simple...to help describe a document's structure and to allow cross-linking of documents.

The language is a Markup Language...a way to enhance a text file with bits of code (markup) that describes the structure of the document. Think of it as what your teachers did to your english schoolpapers. When they corrected it, they marked it up...probably in red to tell you what things needed to change to hopefully make your documents better.

Today the language has grown substantially and it's gained two allies that are closely associated with it. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is supposed to help HTML look great by describing the way that the document is supposed to look. JavaScript is supposed to build interactivity.

What's so different about HTML5?

There's a couple of great new approaches that are taking place in the HTML5 description.

Make  WebApps

First, the language is being built around WebApps...small focused applications that can run on a browser or as a mobile application. The new version of HTML has features like offline storage or the ability to handle data even when the app is no longer connected to the internet, geo-location or the ability to detect and work with the location of the user as well as excellent rich media support...providing easy to implement audio and video elements.

More Descriptive Semantics

The original goal of HTML was to develop a language that could describe the structure of a document. As the web grew, developers realized that oftentimes they were describing the same types of elements. For example...a header, a footer, nav, articles, sections, etc. HTML5 recognizes where the language has developed and incorporates those elements into the language with new tags for that type of content.

Media Elements

One of the great new improvments in HTML5 is the development of rich media tags like audio and video. Fully programmable with JavaScript, these tags offer incredible ease of use while also offering powerful flexibility through extensive access to media elements through programming

Why not HTML5?

I wish we could all be using HTML5 today, but the reality is that there's a few problems that prevent the language from use in modern websites.

Browser Support

The main problem with HTML5's acceptance is that only modern browsers support it. By modern, I mean almost everything except for Internet Explorer. The new version...IE9 offers excellent support, but as of this writing it's not quite out of beta. Even if it were, the majority of people will still use older versions of IE for quite some time. There are things you can do to make the language play nice with older browsers, but none of them are perfect.

The Language is a Spec

Another problem is that although parts of the language are very stable, the language itself is considered a work in progress, so technically, any of the elements could change at any time. The language is not expected to be completed for several years, which complicates things further. Thankfully, a lot of the language is considered stable and ready to use. I think it's such a great move forward, that you should develop a Graceful Degradation approach to writing your HTML. That simply means writing HTML that will work with older browsers, but will offer users with more modern browsers an enhanced experience.

Media Licensing Issues

Another ugly fact about HTML5 is that because of licensing issues, rich media has to be compressed in multiple formats in order to be compatible with most browsers. So you'll probably use something like mp3 audio for webkit browsers (safari, chrome), and ogg for mozilla (firefox) browsers. It involves a bit more work and it is a pain, but hopefully those issues will be resolved soon.

1. Mutuality

Due to usability purpose the web sites made by developers are highly interactive nowadays and for this developers need to include fluid animations, stream video, play music and Social Network sites like Facebook and Twitter into the websites. Till now they have only the option to integrate it with the help of Flash or Silverlight, Flex or javascript like tools. But these consume so much time to develop and even the complexity of web application also increased. But now with the help of HTML5 it is possible to embed video and audio, high quality drawings, charts and animation and many other rich content without using any plugins and third party programmas as the functionality is built into the browser.

2. Cleaner markup / Improved Code

HTML 5 will enable web designers to use cleaner, neater code, we can remove most div tags and replace them with semantic HTML 5 elements.

3. Improved Semantics

Now it is easy to see which parts of the page are headers, nav, footers, aside, etc as the tags are specific for these all and most importantly know what their meaning and purpose is in whole the format. By using HTML5 elements we can increase the semantic value of the web page as the codes are very standardized.

4. Elegant forms

HTML5 enables designer to use more fancier forms. Even it makes form validation native to HTML, User interface enhancements and reduced need for JavaScript (only needed in browsers that don’t support form types). There will be different type of text inputs, search and different fields for different purpose.

5. Consistency

As websites adopt the new HTML5 elements we will see more greater consistency in terms of the HTML used to code a web page on one site compared to another. This will make it more easier for designers and developers to immediately understand how a web page is structured.

6. Improved Accessibility

Different technologies can elaborate on the features with the help of HTML5, as they can Immediately make more detailed understanding of the structure of a page by take a look at HTML5 elements it has.

7. Fulfill  the need of Web application

Many new features and standards have emerged as part of HTML 5. Once you detect the available features in today’s browsers, you can take advantage of those features in your application. Main focus of HTML5 is to make easier application with easy front-ends, drag and drop tools, discussion boards, wikis and other useful elements.

8. Offline Application cache

All browsers have some kind of caching m After a sometime, you open up your laptop and click the Back button in the browser hoping to see the previous page that was opened. However, as you are not connected to the internet and the browser didn’t cache the page properly, you are unable to view that page. You then click the Forward button thinking that at least that page will load, but it doesn’t. You need to reconnect to the internet to be able to view the pages. HTML 5, thankfully, provides a smarter solution. While building the site, the developer can specify the files that the browser should cache. So, even if you refresh the page when you are offline, the page will still load correctly. This sort of caching has several advantages like offline browsing, files load much faster and reduced load on server

9. Client-side database

While cookies have been used to track unique user data for years, they have serious disadvantages. The largest flaw is that all of your cookie data is added to every HTTP request header. This can end up having a measurable impact on response time. So a best practice is to reduce cookie size. With HTML5 we can do better  by using  sessionStorage and localStorage(two different storage in HTML5) in place of cookies. It is not a permanent database, but enables you to store structured data, temporarily.

10. Geolocation support

With help of Geolocation any one can find out where you are in the world and sharing that information with people. There is different ways to figure out where you are — your IP address, your wireless network connection, which cell tower your phone is talking to, or dedicated GPS hardware that calculates latitude and longitude from information sent by satellites in the sky. But The new HTML5 geolocation APIs make location, whether generated via GPS or other methods, directly available to any HTML5-compatible browser-based application.

This is only the overview of the HTML5 advantages, actually there is lots more to know about HTML5. In the near future HTML5 will become a online development language. It is assumed that it will not completely finished before 2022.So just keep it in your mind and start using HTML5 in your designs right now!
What are your thoughts on this? please share them with us in the comment section below!