HTML5 Design Feature

When I design a site, I often look for ways to do something new or different.HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was first developed in 1990 and HTML5 is the fifth incarnation of this language that drives the web.

Canvas

HTML5’s canvas element, in combination with JavaScript (another language), allows you to produce some amazing, interactive animation. One of the advantages over Flash is that the animations are editable, instead of being locked up in a proprietary piece of software. The possibilities for this element are limitless: from simple 2D animations that tell a story, to complex online applications such as image editing.

Drag and Drop

HTML5’s built-in drag and drop element has some interesting applications, especially for e-commerces sites, image sharing sites like Flickr and online applications.The drag and drop demos at html5demos.com ,demonstrate some of the possibilities of this native element of HTML5.

Video and Audio Embedding

You may be thinking, “What’s the big deal? I can already watch video on the web.” HTML5 allows video to be embedded without having to use the proprietary Flash player. Flash is a resource hog and can really slow down browser performance. You may have heard of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs refusing to support Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Apple, among other hardware/software manufacturers, is driving a movement towards broad implementation of HTML5 so their products can serve up video without straining the operating system or needlessly draining battery power.

SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) is a language for describing 2-dimensional graphics. Rather than creating graphics in a separate program such as Photoshop or Illustrator, saving them in JPG, GIF and PNG format, and bringing them into HTML, SVG images can be created directly inside the HTML. Aside from ease of use, SVG images are infinitely scalable since they are created using mathematics instead of pixels. SVG technology has been around since 1999, but has not had wide-spread browser support until recently. HTML5 supports static as well as animated SVG. That means you could create a video using SVG and scale it up or down while it’s playing, right from the web page. There’s a video here from a developers conference in Australia demonstrating some of these features