Does HTML5 really beat Flash?
Out of context: Reply #58
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- ukit0
HTML5 is simply the new version of HTML. Look at the top of the document when you create a webpage and it usually says "HTML 4.01" or "XHTML 1.0."
There is a group of people in a magical land somewhere called the W3C, who spend time actually figuring out how HTML should work. Tim Berners-Lee is actually still the official head of that group I believe. So they created HTML1, 2 and 3, and then HTML4 was their last official release, all the way back in 2000 or so.
After that a lot of people decided that integration with XML was the most important thing to focus on, so they spent a lot of time creating a new language called XHTML, a version of XML which looks pretty much like HTML, but can be read by an XML parser.
After a few years of pounding away at this a lot of the people who were actually having to work with HTML and websites in their businesses were getting frustrated that actual HTML wasn't progressing faster, so they were like fuck this shit, and some of the people from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera went and formed a second group, called WHATWG or WHATWJD or something, to help work on it.
So the two groups joined up and started working on HTML together, leading to HTML5, the first effort in ten years to introduce actual new features into HTML. It will introduce a bunch of new tags, the most basic ones being semantic layout tags. So instead of writing <div class="header">, you will finally just have a <header> tag, <footer> tag, and tags for navigation and content.
The flashier stuff is things like a <video> and <audio> tag. There is also something called <canvas> which is a bitmap animation capability right in HTML. You will also have the ability to edit HTML on a site from the user end, detect a user's exact location, store data offline more efficiently, and other more technical stuff.