HTML5

All unapproved Citizendium articles may contain errors of fact, bias, grammar etc. A version of an article is unapproved unless it is marked as citable with a dedicated green template at the top of the page, as in this version of the 'Biology' article. Citable articles are intended to be of reasonably high quality. The participants in the Citizendium project make no representations about the reliability of Citizendium articles or, generally, their suitability for any purpose. This article is currently being developed as part of an Eduzendium student project. The course homepage can be found at CZ:Special_Topics_2010. To provide students with experience in collaboration, you are warmly invited to join in here, or to leave comments on the discussion page. The anticipated date of course completion is 13 August 2010. One month after that date at the latest, this notice shall be removed. Besides, many other Citizendium articles welcome your collaboration!

HTML5 is the next generation hypertext markup language standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is used by web programmers and designers to lay out web pages, which people can then view in web browsers. As of July 2010, HTML5 is still not widely supported nor fully standardized, though browsers such as Google Chrome [1], Apple Safari [2], and Mozilla Firefox[3] have implemented various parts of the language.

HTML5 represents an important step forward technologically, as it gives web developers greater capabilities and more flexibility in interacting with the underlying operating system. One important new capability is offline storage, which allows sites to better handle persistent sessions for their users. For example, if a user is editing a document in an online web editor, HTML5 allows some portion of the state associated with the document to be saved onto the user's computer -- rather than saving all of it to the server, as is currently done. This reduces the server load, and also provides a faster, more responsive experience for the user, as less data needs to be transferred over the network.

HTML5 also is milestone politically and socially in the web world. As the web has evolved, many vendors have created proprietary technologies to enable greater functionality for their applications. Some of the most important include Adoble's Flash plugin, as well Microsoft's Silverlight and their browser Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer has a notable reputation for employing non-standard extensions to web technologies). While such innovations enable a richer user experience, they also fragment development, and make browser compliance