McLaughlin - What Is HTML5?

Copyright 2011 O'Reilly Media, Inc.

HTML has always been about interconnection. Back in the ancient days, when electronica was cool and not called house music and before the Rolling Stones qualified for Medicare, the web was littered with big huge documents. In fact, it was exactly the opposite of today, where most people think enhanced digital books are just electronic wrappers around full-text copies of whats in print.

In the 90s, the web was full of 15-page specifications, all in a single file. You scrolled through those massive documents just like you paged through an encyclopedia. Much of the early versions of HTML were intended to deal with this, widely considered a detriment to the readability and usability of the web. Thats largely because Tim Berners-Lee, the recognized father of HTML, was a researcher enabling other researchers (mostly at CERN at the time). If youve ever known anyone mired in research, brevity is rarely their prevailing trait, so reading huge documents online was a necessity, but scrolling through 15- (or 1,500-) page documents just wasnt a long-term option.

So early on, HTML was not primarily about displaying those documents with lots of formatting. Most fundamental to HTML was the simple a tag. It gave a document the means to link to another document. Suddenly 15-page documents were reduced (mercifully) to 15 one-page documents, all linked together. Bye bye scrolling; hello useful linking. This is all pretty standard fare, and if much of this is new to you, then the waters are going to get deep quickly.

Fast forward to the present. Ultimately, this ability to connect things on the Internet is still the primary feature of HTML5. Its just that now, were starting to realize the original vision of HTML, and connect a lot more than hypertext with static images. So the introduction of the audio and video elements in HTML5 are nothing more than logical extensions of the old a element.

(Note: in a more correct sense, audio and video replace object and all the embed code that people have been throwing into web pages for years, largely pulled from sites like YouTube or Vimeo. Still, those elements are semantically functioning more like an a element that drops the link into a page, rather than taking you off to another destination. In that sense, even the img element is in some ways nothing more than an inline a element: it grabs content from another location and pulls that content into a page. Its all just linking, and thats what HTML is really about: linking and connecting things.)

So now you can pull in images, audio, and video directly into a document. More importantly, because those items now have first-order elements, you can easily manipulate the audio and video from JavaScript. Thats a big deal, and something Ill come back to later. In a nutshell, a first-order element is always going to encourage more direct programmatic access than one in which you have to be sneaky or clever to really get at it.

So while the audio and video elements are new, their purpose isnt. HTML5 allows you to integrate more assets into a single document, all while keeping the integrity and separation of those assets into place. This is nothing more than making sure that the bibliography of a document isnt physically stuck at the end of a long web page, but is in fact separate and easily maintained, but still able to be integrated into the rest of the page.

Now, before moving on, you need to immediately see that its not (relatively) important that you can grab audio and video and drop it into an HTML page. What is important is that you can more easily grab other stuff and drop it into a page. There may eventually be 20 or 25 elements for things well beyond audio and video, and the fundamental premise is still the same: the important thing here is that multiple pieces in multiple places can all be wired together in a meaningful way, with semantic elements describing that stuff easily accessible by JavaScript. The fact that, in HTML5, that other stuff happens to be audio and video is cool, but rather incidental.