The term HTML5 is essentially a buzzword that refers to a set of modern web technologies. This includes the HTML Living Standard, along with JavaScript APIs to enhance storage, multimedia, and hardware access.
What is HTML5?
HTML5 is the latest specification of the HTML language, and represented a major break with previous markup practices. The purpose of the profound changes to the language was to standardize the many new ways in which developers were using it, as well as to encourage a single set of best practices with regards to web development.
You may sometimes hear about "new HTML5 elements", or find HTML5 described as a new version of HTML. HTML5 was the successor to previous HTML versions and introduced new elements and capabilities to the language on top of the previous version, HTML 4.01, as well as improving or removing some existing functionality. However, as a Living Standard HTML now has no version. The up-to-date specification can be found at html.spec.whatwg.org/.
HTML History and Development
HTML has been around for a long time. Its roots go back to at least 1980, with Tim Berners-Lee‘s project ENQUIRE. And actually, the concept of hypertext goes back even further than that. The concept first appeared in the early 1940s, and was named and demonstrated in the 1960s.
In 1989, Lee proposed a new hypertext system based on the ideas of ENQUIRE (and other systems, such as Apple’s HyperCard). This became the first version of what we now call HTML. Read more:
The language has evolved over all this time because web development has changed. We do things with web pages and HTML today that were never dreamt of by the early developers and implementers of the language. A web page is no longer just a document; it is likely to be a full-scale web application. And even when it is “just a document,” we want search engines and other tools to understand the content of the website. We aren’t just creating pages for human readers anymore, but for artificially-intelligent systems that collect and manipulate information. Read more:
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