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HTML5 brings a host of new elements and attributes to allow developers to make their documents more easily understood by other systems (especially search engines!), display data more uniquely, and take on some of the load that has required complex JavaScript or browser plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight to handle. Here are 10 new items in HTML5 that will make it easier for you to write your Web sites. 1: <video> and <audio> One of the biggest uses for Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies is to get a multimedia item to play. With HTML5 supporting the new video and audio controls, those technologies are now relegated to being used for fallback status. The browser can now natively display the controls, and the content can be manipulated through JavaScript. Don’t let the codec confusion scare you away. You can specify multiple sources for content, so you can make sure that your multimedia will play regardless of what codecs the user’s browser supports. 2: <...

HTML5 has several goals which differentiate it from HTML4. The primary one is  consistent, defined error handling . As you know, HTML purposely supports 'tag soup', or the ability to write malformed code and have it corrected into a valid document. The problem is that the rules for doing this aren't written down anywhere. When a new browser vendor wants to enter the market, they just have to test malformed documents in various browsers (especially IE) and reverse-engineer their error handling. If they don't, then many pages won't display correctly (estimates place roughly 90% of pages on the net as being at least somewhat malformed). So, HTML5 is attempting to discover and codify this error handling, so that browser developers can all standardize and greatly reduce the time and money required to display things consistently. As well, long in the future after HTML has died as a document format, historians may still want to read our documents, and having a complet...

Introducing HTML5 HTML5 introduces a number of new tags and makes several others obsolete. That doesn’t mean an earlier version, such as HTML4.01, won’t display properly in the latest web browsers, as they all have excellent backwards compatibility. However, you should swap obsolete tags for their HTML5 alternatives. If you’ve already built a website, you should be familiar with using <div> to define a block on the page, which you can then style, up using CSS. This has been retained in HTML5, along with <span> (to pick out inline blocks for individual formatting) and joined by specific block types including <nav>, which is used to define a navigation element, such as a menu. Many new tags help to define the content of a page rather than just position it within the flow. For example, <figure> ties an image to its caption, let ting you style the pair as a single block and to sub-style the contents- image and caption – individually inside it. Even if you don’t...