HTML5 isn’t some radically new technology. In fact, unlike XHTML, which was intended to foster a new way to build web pages, HTML5 is about making sure the web continues to work as it always has. Most of the basics of HTML are still in place. HTML5 adds a few new elements, meant to support the way web designers currently build websites. In HTML5, for example, the <header> tag can contain the content you’d usually find at the top of a page, such as a logo and site-wide navigation links; the new <nav> tag encloses the set of links used to navigate a site; and the <footer> tag houses the stuff you usually put at the bottom of a page, like legal notices, email contacts, and so on.
In addition, HTML5 adds new tags that let you insert video and audio into a page, and new form tags that add sophisticated form elements, like sliders and drop-down date pickers, as well as built-in browser support for form validation to make sure visitors correctly fill out your forms. Unfortunately, browser support for these new features isn’t consistent and it’s therefore difficult to use the new tags without some pretty elaborate workarounds to ensure cross-browser support.
In addition, Dreamweaver CS6 doesn’t provide quick tools for inserting HTML5 tags. While Dreamweaver offers click-to-insert buttons that make it easy to insert HTML4 tags like the <img>, <table>, or <p> tags, it doesn’t provide similar buttons for HTML5 tags like <header>, <footer>, <article>, or <section>. You can, of course, type HTML5 tags directly into the code of any page in Dreamweaver—the program even provides “code hints” for the tags.
But new tags are just one small part of the HTML5 story. HTML5 started life as a product of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Group (WHATG), which wanted to create a version of HTML that provided the tools needed to build powerful, browser-based applications like Gmail. So, much of HTML5 is devoted to powerful (and complicated) technologies like Canvas (for drawing pictures and diagrams on a web page), data storage (for storing information like game scores, preferences, and notes on a visitor’s computer), drag and drop functionality, “web workers” for making JavaScript programs run faster and more efficiently, and “web sockets” for streaming data from a web server. All these technologies are promising, but browser support for them varies. In addition, Dreamweaver doesn’t provide any easy-to-use tools to tap into these complicated technologies, so you’re a few years off from being able to easily include most HTML5 functionality on your sites.
Get Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
