Lisa Schneider writes for The Hired Guns blog about the technological changes that everyone in digital organizations needs to know about, whether it affects their own job directly or not. Questions about technology or making the transition to a primarily digital career? You can either put them in the comments or ask them via Twitter.
Recently, a colleague left a dinner where there was lots of talk about HTML5. “What does this mean for our website?!” was the fairly panicked email I received.
Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when people outside the digital or IT teams could ignore the technology behind websites and applications. And while not everyone needs to know how to code, workers in management, editorial, marketing, and other areas all definitely need to know enough about the technology to understand its implications.
HTML5 is simply the next iteration of HTML. But what’s different, and why are people excited?
- HTML5 enables you to embed media content, like video, that used to require additional plug-ins (such as Flash).
- HTML5 includes programming elements that used to also be outsourced to other functions, such as Javascript and CSS.
- HTML5 is more search-friendly.
(Want more detail? I like this post from Alexander Castillo at Door5: Are you afraid of HTML5?)
Here’s what you need to know about HTML5 and what it will take to implement it on your website:
1. You don’t need to panic. HTML5 is backward compatible, which means that everything on your site that works now in HTML4 will still work in HTML5. You do not have to rip up your site and start over.
2. It’s easy to start. “Upgrading” to HTML5 can be as easy as changing the first line of every HTML page (the doctype). If you make this change, all the current HTML4 elements on your page will still work correctly.
3. You can implement it slowly. HTML5 isn’t all-or-nothing. It’s a collection of features that can be implemented individually. For example, you can use HTML5 to create a kickin’ form in which a mobile browser recognizes an email field and customizes the onscreen keyboard to make it easier to type email addresses. Meantime, all the existing features in HTML4 will continue to work elsewhere on that page.
4. Plan for uneven broswer support. Not all browsers have equal support of HTML5. In some cases, as with the form field described above, older browsers that don’t support the email input type will treat it as a regular text field. It’s not as great a result, but nothing bad will happen. For other features, you’ll need to plan fallback solutions for older browsers — which means giving your tech team the time and resources to implement and test both solutions.
Want to know more about HTML5? Here’s a list, mostly drawn from one put together by Andrew Trice at Adobe:
- HTML5 [Wikipedia]
- HTML5 Rocks
- Dive Into HTML5
- HTML5 Demos and Examples
- The HTML Test (“How well does your browser support HTML5?”)
- HTML5 tags [W3schools.com]
- HTML5 differences from HTML4 [World Wide Web Consortium]
- Can HTML5 Future-Proof Your Mobile Strategy? [Audience Development]
And a quick overview video:
