HTML 5 Tag Changes

Posted by on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 10:49 am.

My colleague Nick and I explain some of the new and discontinued tags in the upcoming release of HTML 5.

All web site designers and developers in the industry have no doubt by now, learnt that the next major edition of HTML (5) is currently being developed. Two versions are being developed together; classic HTML and the increasingly popular XHTML variant. Whilst I remember reading an article about the core updates to HTML 5 over a year ago, it looks as though HTML probably won’t be completely finished for at least another couple of years. Web sites like Wikipedia and several blogs that I have read have suggested that elements of HTML 5 may start being rolled out in internet browsers, ahead of the final edition of HTML 5.

As HTML 4 has been the stable version of HTML for about 12 years now, I asked the question if a new version is really that necessary? With the combination of languages like ASP, PHP and Javascript over the past 12 years, the application, methods and technology available to web designers and developers is vast. One way to look at this question is to look at some of the new tags that are being introduced. Some of the new tags that stand out for me are the new <audio> and <video> tags. If I think back 10 or so years I can remember being on the internet at school. Because of bandwidth limitations etc at the time, I can remember that things like audio, flash and video were not common on web sites. Instead I remember seeing a huge amount of animated gifs! So it only seems to make sense that new tags are being made available to web designers to better integrate these file types onto their web pages.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have also taken an increasingly prominent role in web design. Because CSS offers such simple control over the design of your HTML documents, this has caused certain HTML tags to become depreciated and obsolete. The introduction and revisions in HTML 5 start to make sense when you consider that HTML 5 will be dropping tags such as <center>, <font> and <strike>. Tags that I haven’t used since I mastered my CSS skills.

In conclusion, although to me the revisions seem small, they are appropriate and help maintain an up-to-date and suitable syntax for coding web sites. I would recommend that all designers and developers in the industry embrace and understand the upcoming revisions so that they can not only learn how to make their life easier but also ensure that they are not using techniques that uses tags that are being removed.