What is HTML 5?

never again. Let's start off with a little listener mail list listener mail poems from Brandon from Iowa City, and Brandon says, I just listened to your show about online productivity and it made me think of another topic. If you haven't done it already, a show about HTML five would be pretty interesting. I have only heard a little bit about it, but it sounds as if it would add some new functionality between the Internet and the user. I really enjoyed the show, but have two suggestions, so

listen up, Chris. Number one, it is most enjoyable when you stay focused on the topic for fifteen to twenty I'm assuming he means minutes, but I guess we can interpret that. However, we like and number two, if I fall into the camp of preferring the calm version of the listener mail, keep up the good work, Brandon, Brandon,

Sorry about that, Brandon. Well, Brandon, um, don't worry. I'm doing the calm version of listener mail because as much as I know the people who who love the old version love it, uh, they don't yell at me like everyone else does. So and of course, I mean I can't really blame them. I I yelled first. So HTML five, yes, you know, there almost wasn't an HTML five. In fact, I didn't know that. Let's let's do a little trip

down memory lane with HTML. We're gonna the actual the time machines in the shop, so we're not gonna be able to take a trip that today. Turns out somebody used it to go and mess up the Magna Carta sign in twelve fifteen. That was me. Um So anyway, so what HTML. Let's let's from the very beginning we go back to CERN. Yes, yes, CERN. You know CERN's the same r M. Yes, same organization that oversees the

large Hadron Collider. So when they're not trying to destroy the universe, CERN is trying to do I I am the first to tell you that the Large Hadron Collider is not going to destroy the universe. That was that was just a joke. But Tim burners Lee works at CERN, and Tim burners Lee is the guy who you may know as the father of the World Wide Web. Yes, and so a lot of the early development for the markup language, the Hypertext Markup Language or h t m L,

was done at CERN. So for the first couple of years really, that's actually for the first i'd say five years, that's that's where most of the development came from. UM. And I'm sorry to go ahead, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was I was going to point out that that HTML, UM, there there's actually a markup language that predates HTML called s g mL, which is a standard generalized markup language. And UM, basically s g mL is this really um extensible complex system that allows you to

define what a markup language actually is. UM. Actually got that paraphrase from the W three C But UM, but yeah, I mean, it's it's serious, it's it's got the ability to describe all kinds of elements and things. UM. And I think, if I'm not mistaken that Mr burners Lee wanted to create sort of a simplified version of s GML that had certain predefined elements, because for any version of STML, you actually have to explain how the markup works.

And HTML is a solidified, preset group of of elements, right, And it's it's a set of of different tags and and ways to describe how something needs needs to look that is recognizable universally. Yes, uh, that that was the whole point of it. It's a set of standards so that everyone can use the same sort of tags to get the same sort of effect. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to display something on the web. And that's really what markup language is

all about. It's it's not necessarily the content that you're seeing on the web, but how that content is presented to you, whether it's in a certain font, a certain color, what kinds of images might be there, how the images are aligned on the page. All of this ultimately goes back to HTML and to an extent, XML extensible markup language. Well, XML is also a derivative of s GML as well. Yeah, um, and it is more uh more extensible, but it's it's

more customizable you can do a lot more with it. UM. In the case of s GML and x m L UH, what you have to do is you have to, as I said before, define what these these tags are. UM. They rely on a document type definition or d T d UH to some degree to explain UM. You know, if you want to create your own tag, that's fine, but you have to explain what to the computer what

that tag is supposed to do. Whats right exactly? HTML is is basically a set document type definition to where there is a certain subset of elements and and tags UM that are you know, pre set in the document type that everyone can use. So it's not really customizable by the end user as much as XML with for example, in HTML, B is going to mean bold and slash

B means in bold and that's that's predefined, uh. Definition as opposed to XML, where you could create a tag that before you you define it really doesn't mean anything at all. It's only after you define it that the computer can interpret it and then display whatever it is

you want, however it is you wanted. UM. Alright, So getting back to h T M L, so the first few years it's it's over at certain and then the the I E T T F then moves to W three C once that gets formed, and we get up to Worldwide Wide Consortium, Yes, and it's a it's an organization UM that works to standardize these sort of things.

We get up to HTML three point oh uh, and then three point two which comes out, and then you get H T M L four, which is really pretty much what we're using now, and H was supposed to have stopped. Yeah, the W three C decided at that point that we had pretty much gone as far as we needed to go with HTML, and that we could if we wanted to go further, or we needed to concentrate on other markeup languages, including x M L Y.

XML was supposed to be the new thing UM. Of course it wasn't actually knew at that point, but they wanted to transition everybody over to that, and then development started on x H T M L UM and everybody thought that that was going to be it. But as it turns out, UM, some some pretty heavy hitters got

into UM. The got the idea into their heads that they wanted to try to bring back HTML in a brand new way when they didn't like X date x H t m L as much part of the problem was that UM, as as a said in the W three C website, uh, XMLS deployment as a web technology I'm quoting here was limited to entirely new technologies like RSS and later ADAM, rather than as a replacement for existing deployed technologies like H T m L, which meant

that you're just getting you're bulking up. You're having to add more and more markup languages to achieve what you want, as opposed to revolutionizing the the basic standards so it includes everything, and it's more elegant, so it's getting more and more chaotic. Uh. And as you said, the heavy hitters decided they wanted to go and look at develop further developing the HTML standard rather than adding new standards.

Those heavy hitters included Apple and Mozilla and Opera and UM that would be the what w G, the Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Yeah, because boy, if there's one thing engineers are good at, it's coming up with acronyms. So uh, I'm just kidding. I know we probably have some engineers out there, you guys are awesome. Then we're going to get into the whole acronym versus yes, I know, well what WIG I pronounced it, so it's an accord acronym. Yes,

it has been acronymified. Now. Originally the w REC had nothing to do with HTML five. They were pretty much saying, no, we are done. We're not going to do any more work on this. You guys go in and do your

own thing, but we're not wasting time on that. But as time went on, the W three C kind of the organization reconsidered its position on the whole HTML five question, and it was about in two thousand and six they said that maybe they did want to kind of participate in the development of the standard, and in two thousand seven they formed a group that works with what wig

to develop HTML five. So what is HTML five all about? Well, there are a lot of a lot of things on the web that you cannot view in a browser without first downloading some sort of plug in, right, So, lots

of video formats, lots of things like that. Um where if you were to get a browser, a brand new browser, especially in older version that doesn't have these things pre built into them, um, you would go to a page and it would tell you you couldn't view that stuff until you first installed a plug in, and so you may have seen this with things like shock Wave, flash players,

all this sort of stuff. Real player, Yeah, there's there's dozens and dozens of them, to the point where that's actually a security concern because, uh, you know, you might encounter a page that tells you there's something on there that you can't view because you don't have the latest plug in of whatever. But in reality, the plug in is not a plug in, it's malware, and so you download it and then your computer is corrupted, and and uh, you end up looking at the screen and cursing a lot.

And this happens fairly well frequently, I won't say often, but frequently enough where it is a legitimate concern. Now, HTML five would take a lot of that worry out because it would build into it support for a lot of the functions that we see on the web. Now wouldn't necessarily give you support to access those tools as they exist, it would kind of recreate the same experience.

So I'm not saying HTML five supports flash. I'm saying that HTML five will have definitions in it for web video and web animation so that you wouldn't have to use Flash, which would be great for people who use things like mobile phones, smartphones that don't have flash support. You wouldn't have to build flash support into these devices,

they would just have to be compatible with HTML five. Well, UM, and you really kind of hit on why I've seen the probably the biggest reason that I've seen so many people excited about HTML five UM. And it's kind of funny to me because you know, I've been using HTML um for coding since htmail two, so you know, I'm to see the standard change. It really sort of passed is without or you know, at least in my experience, is past sort of without comments like oh well we've

got some some new tags. We can go ahead and we can add this functionality. UM. But hmail five people people are actually talking about it. People are actually sort of excited about it. And I think it's the two tags that I've seen most people excited about, the video and the audio tag UM. And this is basically going to allow people to embed multimedia files in the page without having to rely on the plug ins, as Jonathan mentioned,

and and it could. The weird thing about this is at least weird to me, is that it's it's sort of flexible. You don't necessarily have to have a certain type of video, like it's only going to support this one there. They're still working on that, and we should actually we should have pointed that out probably a while back. This isn't a a fully formed specification yet. They're still

tweaking it and probably will be for a bit. Um. But yeah, they're working on ways to actually uh embed the the multimedia element of a web page directly into the HTML. And there are a lot of things that you'll be able to do with it, um that you couldn't do with htmail because frankly, HTML was not meant to do what we do with it on the web anyway,

which is why we have plugins and things like flash. Yeah, because in order to have the the really rich user experiences that we expect on the web, web developers have pretty much had to force that into the web because the markup language of the web was not designed to present that kind of experience to the user. Um. But you know, through some ingenuity we've when when I say we,

obviously I don't mean myself. I've never actually developed any of these tools, but engineers developed tools that would allow you to see things on the web that otherwise you'd never get a chance to to get a look at. And uh, as we've mentioned before, even even if you are careful and you don't accidentally download malware because you tried to download a plug in that it wasn't really a plug in, plug ins still cause a and they can still be a security risk. They can still create

vulnerabilities in a browser security. So uh, getting rid of plugins is kind of a good thing from a security point of view. UM, I'm not sure that the companies that designed these plug ins would necessarily agree. I wonder how companies like Adobe and Microsoft view HTML five, how many of them will support that that particular standard, because you've got products like Flash, You've got products like silver Light.

UM these are are in a way competing with HTML five or what HTML five will ultimately be, so uh and you know, real networks, all that kind of stuff. You've got all these different uh UM standards or plugins out there that HTML five, if if, if people actually adopted on a widespread scale, will effectively replace. Well. UM. Two of the formats that I've seen people talk about two UM are the OGG formats, which are open source

video and audio. UM Vorbius is the audio file. It's it's more or less, it's not exactly, so don't start writing me with nasty Graham's it's more or less the equivalent of an MP three file. It's encoded differently than an MP three file, and there are no royalties to be paid, unlike the case of MPEG one Audio layer three. UM. But um, there's also the video file, which is uh

og theora and UM. A lot of people are saying, this is going to be a way where we can embed these types of files into an HTML page and not have to worry about the licensing fees and and all that that that go into uh to creating these files. We don't have to do that anymore, UM. And I think that's it's gonna bring a lot of functionality right to a web page, um, without having to to do

all that stuff. And that's that's probably the coolest thing about it, I think a lot of people for a lot of people, once it actually goes into practice and there's an adopted HTML five standard and the web browsers all support it. Obviously, with people like Mozilla and Apple and Opera already on board with the idea in the

first place, they're going to support it right off the bat. Um. But when I'm the average person probably isn't gonna care because he or she is not necessarily gonna notice that much of a difference, unless they're using smartphones to access the web, in which case they're going to notice that a lot more websites are UM have kind of content

features like there. The other day, I was trying to look up a restaurant's website on my phone, and because my phone also does not support flash, it just it came up with the redded broken box with the question mark and uh, and that was very frustrating for me because all I wanted was to take a quick look at this menu, but they had designed it in a flash format as opposed to just a regular text format or or PDF file or whatever. And uh, to be

able to access just simple things like that. And that's that's not even counting things like web video. Most web video I can't view either. I can view YouTube because I've got a YouTube application on my phone, but um, otherwise I can't view flash based video. And UH, there are a lot most of the mobile uh smartphone operating system designers are working on incorporating flash, at least on

some level in their their operating systems. They're working with Adobe, but that development is in various stages depending on which OS you're talking about, and some of them are dragging their heels a lot more than others. For example, Apple UH has been notoriously slow to UH to work with

Adobe to get flash on the iPhone. Yes, but then if Apple is really really eager to push the HTML five standard, perhaps that's the reason why it doesn't make you wonder how that's going to affect UH sites that you heavily use plug in features right now? Are they going to adjust to HTML five eventually? Or will they cling to the old model? Like is YouTube going to change over to an HTML five How massive and undertaking would it be to switch everything over? We still have

to have the individual files. Yeah, so it may be. It may be easier than you think. We'd have to have an insight that we don't have currently into the

back end how all that works. Um, But for all of you HTML heads, people who actually are coding in HTML or and really haven't gotten into it, um, they're also going to be some they're really nice, um, really nice features to HTML five that you didn't have before, Like UH, if you've used HTML for, you're familiar with the div tag, which is a division basically a section of the page. Well, HTML five is designed to have to allow to make better specification of of sections of

the page. They're gonna their tags for, at least at the moment in the current specification for things like section and header, footer, um, you know, article, so you can better have outlined in your htmail document how and where

you want things to go. Um. And there's also gonna be some uh, some other block elements that you're going to be able to use to give you better control, and even even elements in the middle of a page um that will let you highlight things, um and make things stand out a little just ways of of drawing attention to text that you didn't have in previous versions of HTML. Which is U gonna be nice for people

to to add? Um? I don't know. I guess some some depth to straight hetmail because you know, after all that that's one of the problems with sites that are heavily dependent on things like plugins. I mean, HTMIL is not in its current state, is not designed to provide that kind of functionality, so they rely on these files flash files for example, are are significantly larger than you might see a straight HTML file, which is essentially text

just text. So um, you're gonna be able to add that kind of of UM functionality without having to rely on larger files. So it probably will help pages load more quickly as well. Um, But like I said, they're they're still hashing all this stuff out and it's going to be a little bit before we know what the final set is UM going to look like. They're also removing some of the tags, things like strike through will

no longer be there and the typewriter text um. You know, and then you know, hopefully they will there will be something that will reach out the screen and punch you in the eye if you try to use the marquee tag because I'm personally against the market tag, if they strike drop shadow from the face of the world, it would be awesome, um, which is not really don't write to me if you're making a joke, if you're if you're not an HTML coder and wanted to know what

it was, I just said, the marquee tag is that tag that everybody started using right after it became popular and Internet Explorer where um have you ncoade something with the marquet tag. It's the tag that lets text scroll from right to laught across your screen, so it looks like a newsticker. Yeah, I like the U. I just think about those web pages from Cerca I don't know, or so animated animated Jeff file, the blank tag, the blink tag, the scrolling the MIDI that loops. I mean

there's no control to turn it off. I designed one of those. Yeah, well I think we all did, those of us who are doing that back. If it makes you guys feel any better, uh to know this, I mean, yes, I did contribute to some of the most awful website design on the web back in the early days. But it makes you feel any better. It took a lot of work to make it that bad, because back then you would look at a page of text with all

these tags around it. You would have to save it, then upload it, then open a browser and look at it realize that, hey, wait, that's not nearly as hideous as I thought it was going to be. I'm gonna need to do some more work on this. Close it, opening back up, make those changes, save it again. So it took a lot of work to really make one of the worst web pages ever, which, by the way, I have to admit back of the day I thought

was pretty cool. Yeah, I didn't realize it was as bad as it was until, you know, years later, when I thought back on it and thought, wow, I'm so glad I don't remember the u r L for that, because I don't want to be able to use the Internet archive to find it. Well, I'm interested in in actually starting to mess with it once they get some free time to Okay, no, there's free time now for me.

When did we get that? No, But I'm interested in seeing how it'll work to actually mess around with HTML five. You can, actually, there are some browsers that do support some versions of the HTML five code, and you can. Yeah, as it stands now, and you can, and you can mess with it some of yourself. If you're interested in doing so, I would encourage you too. It's it's interesting and fun to to make a web page, even as horrible as the ones that Jonathan and I made back

in seven. We both believe that you guys can do way. I'm sure you can, and the tools that you have in the knowledge that you have far else strips what we had to work with. Back then. Yeah, But um, but this is gonna be this is gonna be a good thing, and I think it's gonna enable more people to uh to do more with it, and it's going to be more open. Uh they're less you know, fewer proprietary standards. More people will support it, which is good.

I always think that pushes innovation. Well, it's a good discussion. Do you have anything else you want to a not really, I mean not without getting into the nuts and bolts, which can get kind of dry. Um, if you're interested in learning more about HTML five, go to W three C dot org um, and there is pretty much all you can eat info about the standard document on the standard really. There's also a good article about it on the IBM website that explains some of the differences between

HTML five and its predecessors. Um, so you know, feel free to check that out too, because, um, it's it's a little to get into right now, but but if you're really interested in it, it may be worth your time. Alright. So this brings us to our second round of listener mail. This listener mail comes from Elliott who's from Wallington, United Kingdom. Do you know what that means? Actually? I'm gonna flip a coin. Please don't so heads, it's the fake British

accent tails. It's normal accent tales. Oh, you guys are lucky this time. Uh thank you? Looking to tailed coin? What jip? Alright? So here here is the email. Hi guys, just finished listening to your podcasts on how social networks could be used to affect social change, and was reminded of a recent example. Over here in the UK. A Facebook group was created to try and make rage against the machines killing in the name the Christmas number one as as supposed or as opposed I think, as opposed

to the latest offerings from Simon Kell's X Factor. The campaign received a massive amount of national news coverage and ultimately achieved its goal, bringing a little bit of rageous trademark anarchy to the usually uneventful Christmas chart race Rages.

Bass Player Tom Morello, already a keen advocate of affecting social change, was so struck by the strength and momentum of the campaign that he pledged that a portion of the money raised from sales of the record would go to Shelter, a charity for the homeless that does an awful lot for the destitute during the festive period. Unsurprisingly, the same rage fans who helped make the Christmas One make the Christmas One, We're keen to take up Morello's cause and set up a site where they too could

donate to shelter. To date, they are just five thousand pounds short of having donated one hundred thousand pounds, and donations are still coming in. Perhaps this is a good example of an event that only came about as a result of social networking that you were speculating about at the end of the podcast. Keep out the good work, guys, cheers Elliott, and uh, yeah, it's a pretty good example. I did right back to Elliott and explained that you know that that kind of started off more as a prank.

It was more of a almost like a protest, saying that these were people who kind of opposed Simon Cowell's project, and you know that's what that represents. Interrupted I didn't mean to the vibe I was getting to when I saw that on there was they were really trying to see if they could mess with it. I believe this is what my English friends would refer to as taking the pit of something. Um. They were taking the pit

out of Simon Cowell's X Factor. So the idea here is that they were just kind of fumbing their noses, but it ended up being at an event that did create social change. Um, it's not really what I was looking for as a good example simply because it didn't start out that way. I'm so certainly glad it ended up that way though. So that was an excellent email. If any of you would like to send us excellent email, you may do so by writing us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Check out our blogs,

check out our live show on Tuesday's at one VM Eastern. Uh. There are lots of ways you can learn way more about us than you ever wanted. To follow us on Twitter anyway, If if none of that sounds appealing to you, stick around. We'll be back again to talk to you really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the

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