It’s been a long time since people started shifting towards dynamic and interactive websites, while static web pages are least preferred by users as well as developers. Advent of mobile browsers make this shift more rapid. Various tools are available and used by developers to achieve this goal. The only concern many people had was unavailability of a standard tool that is easily understood by the humans as well as computational devices and incorporate all the features that support the development of a dynamic website. To handle these issues a new markup language named HTML5 was launched by World Wide Web Consortium and WHATWG. HTML5 is rapidly taking over World Wide Web and attracting more and more attention of developers due to the amazing features it offers in one single package. Some of the features that differentiate HTML5 from previous versions and other tools are:

Audio/Video Support

Developers don’t need any external support for adding Audio or video on their sites; HTML5 provides native support to incorporate both.

Browser Support

HTML5 have made things much easier for developers as it is supported by all the big browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari IE9 and Opera).

Better Websites

HTML5 provides many new capabilities and support developers in making websites more interactive and dynamic. Some of these capabilities are: GeoLocation; Drag and Drop; offline database storage; document editing and timed media playback.

Smart Devices

As smart devices are gaining more and more popularity, the trend of using mobile browsers is also increasing. This shift in trend has increased the need of mobile sites and most of the new websites are developed accordingly and even old websites are shifting towards mobile supported sites. HTML5 is constructed while keeping all these requirements in mind and provide great support for developing mobile sites.

Game Development

HTML5 also provides the options of developing interactive and appealing games. Rovio, Disney and many other web based gaming companies are launching games based on HTML5. In addition to mobile sites, HTML5 also support mobile games

Smoother Data Entry

Be it a keyboard attached to a PC or a smartphone, users spend a lot of time typing. A user’s experience with a website could become frustrating if entering data on the website is mundane. Typing through on-screen keyboards is also a different experience in comparison to traditional keyboards. HTML5 has several new features which makes typing a much smoother experience for both traditional and on-screen keyboards as well as for smart devices.

Client Side Storage

In older versions of HTML, cookies and server-side infrastructure are the main source of storing data in user’s browser. In addition to these existing features, HTML5 empowers browsers with additional features that enable them to store data that persists across sessions.

This is just a glimpse of the features provided by HTML5. People who criticize HTML5 state that most of these features are already supported by various tools but the main advantage HTML5 provides its users is the availability of these features in one single package.