HTML 5 is like the quiet kid in class who sat in the back, didn’t play team sports, didn’t get any girls, but who you knew was really smart and capable and a little bit otherworldly, and that one day he’d probably be grow up to be President. HTML 5 is that kid. Except that he’s not just going to be President of the United States. He’s going to be the President of Space. Mr. Space President.
HTML5 in a sentence.
You can’t describe HTML 5 in a sentence because there’s too much going on with it. Which is why this is a post. Not a Tweet.
I didn’t know there was an HTML 4.
Neither did I. That’s because the last iteration of HTML – to HTML4 was last century, around 1997. Given the speed of Internet development, that’s like two ice ages ago. For web-designers, the change will be akin to the change to table-less CSS. Massive, all encompassing, you-must-know-this-or-you-don’t-have-a-job-anymore kind of change.
Is Flash is Dead?
Yes, thank God. Around about the time Steve Jobs ruled Flash out of the I-pad, there was a debate about the future of Flash. Most sat on the fence. If you still really don’t believe Flash is dead, go ask a recruiter how many phone calls she’s getting from clients wanting Flash developers.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
- Steve Jobs
April, 2010
What’s HTML 5 in a sentence again?
HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that makes it much easier to structure web pages.
How will HTML 5 affect SEO?
Because HTML 5 introduces elements that dissects or structure pages, this will effect search engines, and thus effect SEO. For instance, currently <div> elements have been used everywhere to structure and order web pages; in HTML 5 an array of new, vastly simplified elements will describe navigation, text sections, articles and headers.
For example:
At present, there is no way to tell search engines how to segment a page. But this will change with HTML 5.
Current (Old)
HTML 5
Additionally, there’s:
- A new <article> tag. The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine.
- A new <header> tag. The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) gives a lot of flexibility. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a lot of stuff, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard–coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.
- A new <footer> tag. The <footer> tag might not be as useful as the <header> one but still it allows to include important information there and it can be used for SEO purposes as well. The <header> and <footer> tags can be used many times on one page – i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility.
- A new <nav> tag. Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.
Change we can believe in.
New changes and the new concepts behind HTML 5 will impact Web developers and designers much more than SEO experts. But this does not mean HTML 5 will not mean changes in organic SEO. Make no mistake, HTML 5 is the future. Let’s just say that the kid’s left high-school and is showing substantial promise at Harvard. But he’ll soon get bored and drop out, go out on his own, and in the process change the World. What we can expect is that when more pages become HTML 5–compliant, search engines will pay more attention to HTML 5. It’s a Chicken and Egg kind of deal. And only then it will be possible to know how exactly search engines will treat HTML 5 pages.
Change we can believe in, pt 2
How fast will this happen? Predicting the future is stupid and belongs to witches cooking stew. Okay so in the future everyone will live on the moon (discovered to be actually made of cheese) and drive hovercrafts to their space-mining jobs … The way people used the Internet in last decade is vastly different form how they are using it now and guess what – they will use it differently in the future. What’s happing in a nutshell right now though is that people are using – and expecting – websites to behave like native apps. Think Youtube, think instant messaging inside of Facebook, think Google Maps. Google specifically developed and built Chrome from the ground up with these large scale usage changes in mind. Add to this the development of mobile capable devices and a large scale language iteration such as HTML 5 is not difficult to understand.
Web technologies in the past have taken a long time to become widely used. AJAX (which powers Google instant search for example) wasn’t widely adopted for years. Now it’s everywhere. I believe the two major elements of HTML 5 that will really push HTML 5 adoption are SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and Browser database caching. I won’t go into details of these, but suffice to say that guess what these two technologies really do for the end-user: they make a webpage behave like a native app.
Resources:
Enable HTML 5 capable video on Youtube
You probably have to be a developer to get the most out to these but have a look anyway:
http://html5demos.com/
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
