The release of HTML 5
HTML 4 has been around for a long time now and most web developers worth any salt can recite it backwards , forwards and upside down. Depending on who you ask, HTML 5 is either the next important step toward creating a more semantic web or a disaster that's going to trap the web in yet another set of incomplete tags and markup soup. What does that mean for the future of websites? The main improvement is the introduction of new tags to aid developers in rendering their pages at a faster rate. The introduction of <canvas>, <nav>, <article>, to name a few tags promises new functionality and simplification of existing development. Allowing faster development with ease of use is a programmers dream come true. Introducing new tags in the HTML schema is a good idea yet always comes at a price.
One can only hope though that W3 gets this one right with all the major browser developers like Microsoft IE, Firefox and Google’s Chrome to avoid the bane of cross-platform issues that all web developers face. Then there will always be the problem of backwards compatibility. As a norm most new software will not work on older software, which makes sense. So how do you know when to do the upgrade to HTML 5 knowing that 90% of the population are using older browsers? The simple solution is to avoid HTML 5 until there is the browser support out there. Hopefully that will be the same day IE6 is finally declared a dead duck by Microsoft. By then we’ll all be dealing with IE8 cross browser issues.
