Java: Java Programming For Beginners a simple Start To Java Programming (Written By a software Engineer)

C
HAPTER
2: B
ASICS
OF
HTML5
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a language used for creating web pages. In fact,
this  language  has  been  in  use  since  the  first  webpage  was  made.  However,  the
functionality  has  evolved  as  newer  and  better  versions  of  the  language  were  introduced.
The  language  is  known  to  have  originated  from  SGML  (Standard  Generalized  Markup
Language),  which  was  earlier  used  for  document  publishing.  HTML  has  inherited  the
concept of formatting features and their syntax from SGML.
One  of  the  most  interesting  and  beneficial  facet  of  HTML  usage,  as  far  as  browsers  are
concerned, is that browsers support both backward as well as forward compatibility. While
backward  compatibility  is  usually  easy  to  achieve,  forward  compatibility  is  tricky  as  the
problem  domain,  in  this  case,  is  infinitely  large.  However,  in  order  to  implement  this,
browsers were designed to ignore tags that it did not recognize.
For  years,  HTML  remained  all  that  people  wanted.  However,  with  time,  people  felt  the
need  for  more,  which  was  catalyzed  by  the  presence  of  another  technology  called  XML
(eXtensible Markup Language). Although, XML shares a lot of similarities with HTML,
there  exist  many  fundamental  differences  between  the  two.  Firstly,  XML  requires  tag
matching  in  the  sense  that  for  every  starting  tag,  a  closing  tag  must  inevitably  exist.
Besides this, XML allow you to create your own tags as it does not possess a fixed set of
tags like HTML.
The tags used in XML are meta-tags or tags that describe the data that is included between
the  starting  and  closing  tag.  In  order  to  ensure  the  validity  of  the  XML  document,  a
technology  called  XSD  (XML  Schema  Definition)  is  used.  However,  this  technology
cannot  be  used  for  validating  HTML  documents  because  HTML  documents  lack  a  well-
defined structure.
The  W3C  (World  Wide  Web  Consortium)  introduced  XHTML  as  an  attempt  to  fix  the

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flaws of HTML. According to the XHTML specification, HTML documents were forced
to  adhere  to  the  format  specifications  used  for  XML.  Therefore,  this  allowed  the  use  of
XSD tools for validation of HTML documents. Although, the integration of XML in the
framework  fixed  some  issues,  some  issues  continued  to  crop  up.  One  of  the  staggering
issues  of  the  modern  times  was  the  growing  need  for  integration  of  multimedia.  While
CSS  did  perform  formatting  of  some  level,  it  was  becoming  inadequate  for  the  growing
demands of users.
In order to provide support for interactivity and animated visuals, a programmable support
called  JavaScript  was  added  to  this  ensemble.  However,  initial  versions  of  this  support
were  difficult  for  programmers  to  understand  and  slow  on  execution  time  incurred.  This
led to the introduction of plug-ins like Flash to get the attention that it did. These plugins
did what was expected of them, but the browser-multimedia integration was still loose in
nature.
HTML5  is  not  an  evolved  form  of  XHTML.  On  the  contrary,  HTML5  can  be  better
described as the reinvented form of HTML 4.01 and how HTML, CSS and JavaScript can
be used together to solve the growing needs of the user base.