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My name is Dallas Pool, and I’m with Master Web Design here in Austin. Recently, in a couple of projects we've been working on, we've been utilizing HTML5 and CSS3. I was truly blown away by the power of these technologies.
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However, I've noticed that many people I talk to about HTML5 and CSS3 are quite unfamiliar with it. Their first question is often, 'What’s wrong with what we have?' HTML4 was kind of thrust upon us, which left many in the dark about how to utilize it effectively.
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This situation has led to a lot of uncertainty and what I like to call 'ID hell,' where classes and IDs are haphazardly used for everything. We've had to do a lot of workarounds to get features like drag-and-drop functioning in the current browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
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Despite the limitations, tables still worked relatively well for us, providing reliable layouting. Many people have remained attached to this approach. While it has improved with Internet Explorer 7, it's still not as robust as it could be—especially when working with CSS.
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CSS is very powerful and offers a great way to style our pages and switch out the look and feel of our systems. However, we are still quite limited in how we can access our elements, contributing to the issues with ID and class management that we face today.
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The lack of structural clarity generates a lot of messy code, resulting in difficulties like managing 4,000 line CSS files that we often inherit in our projects. So, what’s new? Well, HTML5 introduces many semantic tags.
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For instance, instead of using a <div> with a class of 'container' or arbitrary identifiers like 'class1', we can now use a <section> tag to wrap our main content. This semantic approach makes it easier to read and understand someone else's code, as you can glean the intended meaning behind their structure.
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Some additional elements like <header>, <nav>, <article>, <figure>, and <footer> also enhance the structure of our markup. The <nav> element is defined by the W3C to encompass your primary site's navigation, not just in-page navigation.
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As for the <figure> element, it is intended to represent content like images with related captions or descriptions. Although HTML5 has improved the clarity of elements, there could still be some confusion regarding the <aside> element. Many tutorials you find online tend to use <aside> for sidebar content, while W3C intended it to denote secondary content like pull quotes.
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Even with these new specifications, there’s a tendency to deviate from them, but it will definitely be interesting to see how the acceptance and usage mature over time. This semantic structure allows for much cleaner markup and makes the code easier to maintain.
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And the good news is that it works in all browsers, including back to Internet Explorer 6. To go for a strict HTML5 doctype, you just need to use a new cleaned-up doctype definition, and modern browsers will recognize the new tags.
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For older formats, if you're still using HTML transitional or strict, you can make these new elements display as block-level elements. Browsers that don't recognize unknown tags will treat them as inline elements unless specified otherwise. Additionally, we now have native support for video and audio in HTML5.
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This marks a significant transition away from Flash for controlling media, as we now have browser support for multimedia content, which includes robust JavaScript and CSS hooks for interactions like scrub, drag, click, play, finish, and end. We also have subtitle support for audio and video, which allows you to display text at specific coordinates on the timeline.
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Another exciting addition to HTML5 is support for cross-domain messaging. This means that your Flash applications can communicate with open browsers, and other applications without interference from security notices. While you can only pass strings, JSON is a string format that can be evaluated, enhancing the interaction capabilities.
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Moreover, there are significant updates to the canvas element. My favorite new feature is the support for required input fields in forms. Finally, browsers support the required attribute, which enhances form validation significantly.
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We also have native drag-and-drop support in browsers that comes with a ton of JavaScript APIs and hooks for developers. Furthermore, HTML5 features offline storage, allowing asynchronous syncing with local databases, which is an essential functionality for modern web applications.
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HTML5 removes a lot of the unnecessary elements that were part of HTML4, such as <bold> and <u> tags, shifting the focus to CSS for styling needs. Attributes related to formatting, like 'border' and 'self-spacing', have been removed to promote better practices using CSS.
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On the CSS side, we gain new options for borders, now including color, images, and radius, allowing for better design flexibility. Rounded corners, drop shadows, and text shadows are highly effective at enhancing the visual appeal of web designs, which helps to speed up page load times by reducing graphical elements.
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Additionally, with the box-sizing property, developers can have more control over how width and height are calculated, which simplifies layouts greatly. The border-radius property for rounded corners and background images can elegantly follow those curves, allowing for sleek and modern designs.
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That being said, if you have a <div> with an <h1> inside, you may still encounter issues where the <h1> element overflows.
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With that, I’ve covered quite a bit of ground, including interesting developments around CSS selectors. You can find most of the information I discussed on my blog at masterwebdesign.net. If you want to dive deeper into CSS3, that’s a good place to start. Thank you.
