Introduction To HTML5
Introduction To HTML5
HTML5
History of HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
Just 15 characters!
The DOCTYPE tells the browser which type and version of document to
expect. This should be the last time the DOCTYPE is ever changed. From
now on, all future versions of HTML will use this same simplified declaration.
The <html> Element
This is what the <html> element looked like in XHTML:
<html lang="en">
The lang attribute in the <html> element declares which language the page
content is in. Though not strictly required, it should always be specified, as it
can assist search engines and screen readers.
Each of the worlds major languages has a two-character code, e.g. Spanish = "es",
French = "fr", German = "de", Chinese = "zh", Arabic = "ar".
The <head> Section
Here is a typical XHTML <head> section:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>My First XHTML Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
</head>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My First HTML5 Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
Notice the simplified character set declaration, the shorter CSS stylesheet link
text, and the removal of the trailing slashes for these two lines.
Basic HTML5 Web Page
Putting the prior sections together, and now adding the <body> section and
closing tags, we have our first complete web page in HTML5:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>My First HTML5 Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<p>HTML5 is fun!</p>
</body>
</html>
Even though we used HTML5, the page looks exactly the same in a web
browser as it would in XHTML. Without looking at the source code, web
visitors will not know which version of HTML the page was created with.