Chapter 1. What is HTML5?

Once you really understand HTML5, you’ll change the way you think about the web.

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HTML5: Everyone’s using it, nobody knows what it is. I realize that sounds more like a line out of an existential movie — maybe Waiting for Godot or a screenplay by Sartre — than a statement about HTML5. But it’s really the truth: most of the people using HTML5 are treating it as HTML4+, or even worse, HTML4 (and some stuff they don’t use). The result? A real delay in the paradigm shift that HTML5 is almost certain to bring. It’s certainly not time to look away, because by the time you look back, you may have missed something really important: a subtle but important transition centered around HTML5.

In this post, I want to take a deeper look at HTML5. I have a simple proposition with a lot of complex consequences: HTML5 is both something entirely new, and yet nothing more than HTML was ever intended to be; and that once you really understand HTML5, you’ll change the way you code and even think about the web and your own web applications.

A return to first principles ...

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