What’s new in HTML5 & CSS3

What’s new in HTML5 & CSS3

The latest versions of HTML and CSS have been approved by W3C and the new features are slowly being integrated into the latest versions of web browsers.

HTML5

HTML is the language used to build web pages. It is based on a specification, which is maintained and approved, by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C.

Some of the new features you can expect to see in HTML5:

Offline content – this allows the user to download all the content needed to view the website into their browser cache, allowing them to view the website in it's entirety when not connected to the Internet. This is one of the new features that I've been playing with and testing how it works, and we've recently added it to 2 of our new sites the new NLP Handbook for Brilliant Minds and the Campus Manual catalogue for Palgrave Macmillan.

Browser integrated databases – another feature of HTML5 that adds even more functionality to offline content is the ability to run a small database within the web browser. This means that you can synchronise a local database running on your computer with the database running on the server. You can then add, edit or delete items in the local database when not connected to the Internet and upload the changes to the server when you are next connect to the Internet. We will be adding this to the NLP Handbook for Brilliant Minds soon.

Video – HTML5 adds a new video feature that allows videos to be embedded into a web page without the need for a browser plug-in or flash media player. This is useful because some mobile web browsers such as the iPhone don't support flash so any video that uses a flash media player would not be playable.

Geolocation – this allows you to display something on your website that is specific to the location of the user, such as their local weather forecast, by calculating where they are in the world. We have implemented this on GrowSave

CSS3

CSS is added to the basic HTML webpage to add styling, colours and design. It is also maintained by W3C.

Shadows and Gradients – the new version of CSS allows shadows and gradients to be specified within the code. If you wanted these design features previously they would have to have been added using image files which take longer to download in the users browser. This means that the web page will appear quicker for the user, and use less bandwidth.

Text shadows – CSS3 also allows you to specify shadows on text anywhere on the webpage, this again improves the load time of the page as it could only be achieved previously by using images.