Hi.
Today we're going to be talking about HTML5.
Specifically what it is, and why we aren't learning HTML1 instead.
So what is HTML?
HTML stands for hypertext markup language.
Markup languages are actually very common.
They're not the same as programing languages,
instead they're special languages that use tags to annotate or markup documents.
In HTML, the tags tell the browsers where you want to put headings,
images, lists, links, et cetera.
A .HTML file is a special kind of file.
You've already seen special file extensions before.
Whenever you open a file that has a .doc,
your computer knows to open it in Microsoft Word.
If you see a file with .ppt your computer knows,
oh that's a Power Point file, I should open it in Power Point.
In the same way, when you computer sees the .html file, it knows that it should
open it in an internet browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Your browser can read this file and it knows how to display it on the screen.
It's more than that, HTML file tags also allow screen readers and other assisted
devices to utilize the tags to present the information in new and special ways.
So HTML is very similar to English,
you can understand it even if you don't know much about it.
Let's look at this example HTML file over here.
Most of it is just a typical English language.
This is an important heading or hi there.
I am going to include a link to the course page.
But if you look closely, you can see we've added these little tiny tags
that the browser use this to know how to represent the material.
So, h1 is just the heading tag.
It says to the browser, hey this is something really important.
I want you to put it in bigger font, and also if someone is using an assisted
device, I want them to know if this is something important.
H2 also displays some sort of importance, but not as much.
I have a p tag for a paragraph,
and I have another tag down here called and anchor tag.
To let the browser know, I don't want you to just show this material,
I want you to actually link it to a different web page.
So here's the output when any browser would look at our code.
In the beginning, learning HTML is mostly about learning all those different
tags that I showed you in that file.
This is called learning the syntax.
It's how you learn which brackets to use, backslashes, and
different things like that.
You spend most of your time going, oh, did I remember that tag and
did I write it the right way?
That's very short-lived.
In just a little amount of time,
you're gonna gain the confidence to not worry about your syntax and
instead to be thinking about the semantics or the meaning behind the tags.
How important is this information that I'm trying to get across, and
is this the right tag to be using?
If someone's searching my page, can they find what they're looking for?
Even if they can't see the text, can they use the tags to navigate through it?
So what happened to HTML1?
Why are we using something called HTML5?
Well, let's talk about the early years.
HTML was created in 1990 as a way to electronically connect
different documents via hyperlinks.
Hence, this idea of a web of connections.
What was happening,
is that scientists were using the Internet to list their different research papers,
and you would have a long list, each paper independent of the other.
But, HTML, gave you ways that you could read a paper, and
right within the text, link to another exciting physics paper.
Because the audience from HTML tended to be people like my dad up there in
the corner, they were nuclear physicists, they didn't care about things such as
color, images, or anything that wasn't science related, and that was the key.
HTML was intended to work across any platform.
And in order to do this you really had to avoid things such as special fonts or
different colors or anything that was more about layout than content.
However, in 1993 Mosaic emerged as the first graphical browser.
And what that means is that there was a first browser to actually introduce
the idea of images and when that happened, there was a lot of
debate among the research community as to whether or not this was a good thing.
The pioneers really wanted to keep it simple content based,
let everyone access it.
But the innovators were saying no.
People like pictures, they like layout.
They like that even as much as they like the content.
So there is a big battle between how the Internet should evolve from that point.
So after Mosaic emerged, the use of the Internet just absolutely exploded, and
more and more people were using it for commercial means, instead of just for
doing research.
Mosaic had challengers though, in the form of Netscape, Internet Explorer and
other browsers.
This was the start of what we call the browser wars.
Each of these browsers decided that they wanted to create these proprietary tags,
tags that would only work on their browser.
Some of the examples were marquee, where you could have scrolling text, or
blink which would only work on some of the browsers and not others.
Other tags were proprietary, they actually worked on any browser, but
they went against the original spirit of HTML.
They were tags such as font or center, for centering your text or background color.
This may not sound like a bad thing, but
some computers didn't have the access, didn't have the ability
to have all the different colors that other computers might have.
And this led to some really ugly looking pages.
That also led to the origination of what we call the best viewed on messages.
When you went to a site you almost immediately told
which browser you should really view the site on.
Otherwise, you weren't going to get the optimal experience.
We all in a way suffer from browser wars, or best viewed on images today.
Many times when you go to a page,
you'll see that you can't actually access the full content if you're on your phone,
unless you click on a link to the full website.
So how did this happen?
How did we get to the point where different browsers weren't agreeing
on the different roles that HTML should play?
This comes back to the idea that no one runs the Internet or the Web.
However, some groups have taken a more proactive role
to try to help standardize what's going on out there.
The first is the Internet Engineering Task Force,
they really focus on the idea of how the different networks should collaborate and
how they should work together.
The World Wide Web Consortium, instead deals with HTML and the evolution of HTML,
they want to know what kinds of tags the browsers should and should not support.
Finally, one of the newest groups, The Web Accessibility Initiative,
they want to make sure, that no matter how people are accessing the web,
they have the same ability to view the content.
We had this evolution of browsers that we've been talking about.
In 1990 to '94 it was all very simple, text-based.
In '93, we talked about how the images entered the scene, and
pretty much exploded the Internet.
Cross-browser compatibility made many of the web pages just fall apart and
led to incredibly ugly code.
In the beginning of 2000 browsers went back to this idea of separating content
from style.
And in 2005 it became standard practice to use HTML files, which we are learning
about in this course, to create the content and CSS files to style it.
So as the browsers evolved so did HTML.
The way it tends to work in most computer signs and
technology fields is that it's the coders and the developers who push the standards.
So as coders learned that there more and
more things that they wanted the ability to do, it's the browsers job to keep up.
So, where are we now?
HTML5 is a cooperation between W3C and
the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, and
what they've done is they've established these four guidelines for
how HTML5 should be approached as browsers go to support it.
The first idea is that new features should be based on HTML,
CSS which is the sign language, the DOM and JavaScript.
Nothing more.
They want to reduce the need for external plug-ins, it's very frustrating when
you're on a browser and you find that you can't watch the video that someone posted.
They also want to move so that mark up, or
the mark up language can replace scripting.
If you find that more and more developers are writing code to make something happen,
get rid of the code and just make a simple tag that can do it instead.
And finally, HTML5 should be device independent.
It shouldn't matter whether you're on your phone, you laptop, a PC or
even on a screen reader.
You want everyone the same access to the information.
So when you think back over this video,
there are certain lessons I really hope to stick with you.
The first is the idea that HTML is not a programing language, but
rather a way that browsers can translate documents into viewable webpages.
HTML was intended to facilitate many different content types.
Images, pictures, links, lists.
Every thing along that line.
What we've found thought the history of the Internet,
is that when designers want to do something They tend to write
nonstandard code to force browsers to do it.
So, this is why we're developing new standards in HTML5 to handle these new
requirements that people desire and push browsers to adopt the new standards.