HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting contents for the World Wide Web, following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1. HTML5 is a core technology of the internet originally proposed by Opera Software.
HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) and currently still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices.
The markup language is elaborated with the purpose of the structuring and presenting of the content that is used in the World Wide Web, the distributing document system of the internet. HTML5 is the advanced and reconsidered version of the HTML standard. The latest version of the HTML that was examined in June 2011, has not been yet completed at that very moment. The main goal of this HTML version developers was to develop the advanced version that can be easily read by the computers and other devices such as browser and parsing and can be exploited by the average users without any difficulties. HTML 5 is to combine the characteristics of the previous HTML versions with the exception of XHTML1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript).
Considering the practical application of the previous HTML versions in the terms of the everyday internet usage, in particular HTML 4.01 and XHTML, HTML5 version gives the ability to affirm that they are the combination of characteristics of diverse specifications; in the common World Wide Web use, this combination usage is equal to such software products, as the web browsers and the syntax errors that exist in the internet documents. At the same time HTML5 is intended to create the single markup language regardless of the syntax it is written in. It possesses the elaborated processing models that are aimed at the perfection of the interoperable realization. This way, HTML5 serves the purpose of the expanding, upgrading and improvement of the markup that is appropriate for the documents and presents the markup and APIs that fit the complex internet applications.
HTML5 provides the unique possibility to get the new characteristic components and elements that appear in the result of the modern websites usage. In the cases of the ordinary usage of the generic blocks and inline elements, the part of these components and elements serve the purpose of the semantic substitutions.
HTML5 includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, and improves the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications. For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a potential candidate for cross-platform mobile applications. Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 a research forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013.
The HTML5 syntax is an independent syntax and has nothing to do with the SGML even regardless some resemblance of the markup. This peculiarity has intentionally been designed with the aim to provide the backward compatibility with the hierarchical analysis of the previous HTML versions. The new opening line of the HTML5 version, that has some similarities with the SGML document type declarative statement, corresponds to the rendering mode that fully meets the required standards. On January 5, 2009, the HTML5 developers implemented WHATWG specification that had earlier been the separate specification.
HTML5 improves interoperability and reduces development costs by making precise rules on how to handle all HTML elements, and how to recover from errors.
The HTML5 working group includes AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera, and many hundreds of other vendors.