This is a guest post by Kit Pierce who loves to read classic literature and blogs about human rights. In her spare time, she writes about at&t internet for attsavings.com. She's interested in steampunk, likes watching funny cat videos, and enjoys discussions about philosophy.

You’ve probably heard about a little thing called HTML5, and you may be tempted to dismiss it as yet another of those Internet things that are constantly changing and/ or will revolutionize everything -- eventually. However, HTML5 has been a reality for a while now, and will be an even bigger fundamental part of the Internet experience over the coming months and years.

If your eyes glaze over when you read things like “hypertext markup language” and “application programming interface,” you’re not alone. But HTML is really just a simple programming language, designed to make it as easy as possible for normal Earthlings to build web pages -- and to make these pages behave the same way, no matter what kind of device or browser they’re viewed with.

When HTML was created, the language was powerful and flexible enough to deliver the full potential of the Internet to a wide range of devices. But it goes without saying that the “the full potential of the Internet” means something quite different today than it did in 1990, or in 1997 when HTML4 tried to standardize existing Internet capabilities. And since then, we’ve had all sorts of developments and ‘tacked-on’ elements, from XHTML to Java and Flash -- many of which were attempts to deliver multimedia content, and to realize the true interactive online promise of “Web 2.0”.

Multimedia Potential

HTML5 is a major step towards incorporating powerful multimedia into the language itself, so no extra plug-ins and divergent standards need to be an issue. Expanded and inclusive commands for video, audio, 2D and 3D graphics (including full support for CSS3) are all part of HTML5, as are a long list of new APIs and commands geared toward interacting with web sites, or integrating web apps and offline environments.

• For a mainstream example of HTML5 video at work, join the YouTube HTML5 trial [http://www.youtube.com/html5]

• Internet Archive’s massive audio library [http://www.archive.org/details/audio] has had HTML5-powered audio since 2010

• Visit Tankworld [http://www.playtankworld.com/] for a fun example of HTML5’s potential for gaming and 3D

Design and Semantics

Speaking of CSS3, a specific goal of the update to HTML5 has been to eliminate the improper use of frames and tables. This may be bad news for those of us who have forced ourselves to master content layout and presentation using tables -- but really, it’s all for the best. CSS was explicitly designed to do these things, while HTML merely allowed them. But even more than this, the increased “semantic” aspects of HTML5 are a more thorough underlying way for data to be consistently organized (and, when necessary, extracted) from one web page to the next.

The Mobile Frontier

One of the main benefits of increasing HTML5 adoption is ‘scalability’ between different devices -- in other words, making sure that a web site works the way that it should whether you’re using a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone. Rather than depend upon close cooperation between your device manufacturer, operating system, browser and / or app developer, HTML5 ensures that web sites and web apps simply ‘get it right from the start’. Among other things, this should ultimately eliminate incompatible platforms and needles extra workarounds altogether (the long-standing issue regarding Apple products and Adobe Flash technology is a perfect example).

Resources

We’ve barely done more than scratch the surface here, but there are plenty of places to go for HTML5 information, examples, and training. These are the best three sites to begin familiarizing yourself with the possibilities:

• As always, the informational center for All Things Web is W3C Schools, which offers both intro tutorial [http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp] and reference-based [http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp] sections

• Similarly, the WhatWG site [http://developers.whatwg.org/] has a wonderfully comprehensive but still readable guide to HTML5 specifications 

• Less ‘academic’, but no less comprehensive, the HTML5 Rocks web site [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/], not only informs but shows how to put HTML5 to best use