Since the publishing of its First Public Working Draft in 2008, HTML5 (not HTML 5) has gained wider acceptance among developers and designers.
While it’s not 100% foolproof, HTML5, combined with CSS3, gives designers greater control on web layout as they envision it, thus more and more web designers and developers committed to using it.
If you haven’t taken a plunge and want to know more about HTML5, here are a few useful HTML5 links you can use as references:
HTML5 Doctor
The website publishes articles relating to HTML5, its semantics, and how to use it right now. In addition, it takes questions from visitors and provide answers in their articles to benefit everyone.Dive Into HTML5
Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards with the final manuscript published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint. Informative section on the use of Microdata can be found on this site as well.HTML5 IE Enabling Script (HTML5 Shiv)
Public repo for the latest HTML5 JavaScript shiv for IE version 8 or under to recognize and style the HTML5 elements.HTML5 Logo
Not as useful as the rest but it’s always cool to have a logo. Use it to spread the word.HTML Revisited
All the technical details and FAQ surrounding HTML5.HTML Cheat Sheet
HTML cheat sheet which has a full list of all HTML elements which includes descriptions, code examples and live previews.
And lastly, you might want to validate your HTML5 markup using these validators:
- Validator.nu (X)HTML5 Validator
- The W3C Markup Validation Service (based on validator.nu)
How to Start Using HTML5
So what do you need to do to start using HTML5? At the very least, you can change your DocType Declaration from the more complex HTML 4 version
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
to this
<!DOCTYPE html>
or to add more HTML5 markups
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Page Title</title> ... </head>
That’s all there is to do to start using HTML5. So even if you haven’t been able to update all your markup, there shouldn’t be any reason for you not to switch to HTML5 now.
Further Reading
Web Design with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery Set
Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming
