By Teddy Hunt
Web development has gradually become easier over time. Gone are the days of messing around on Geocities and creating eye-sore websites. The best new thing in web development is HTML5. If you’re not using it, you’re really missing out. Here are a few reasons you should be using HTML5 (any code used in the text was changed to brackets to avoid formatting issues).
Image via Flickr by Sebastian Fuss
Neater Code
If you’ve dealt with anything other than HTML5, you know exactly how messy code can get. With HTML5, though, you can create clear, descriptive semantic code. You’ll be able to easily separate function from style. Before, you’d have to use [div] for each individual block of content. HTML5 has [article], [header], [footer], and [nav] tags, as well as a few other ones that make it much more organized.
Mobile Support
You want your site to be accessible across all platforms, regardless of device, right? Then it’s time to adopt HTML5. HTML5 is fully supported by mobile browsers, so you won’t have any issues with people on mobile devices unable to see your content. With Flash support being officially off the radar for mobile support, HTML5 is the next best option. HTML5 will let your users view your content in full screen. You can also define width and zoom settings.
Full Audio and Video Support
Remember the pains of trying to embed a video or a piece of audio onto your site? It usually involved a lot of tags and troubleshooting when it inevitably wouldn’t work. You’d end up with code to embed a video that would sprawl across ten or more lines! Thanks to HTML5, those days are long gone.
HTML5 treats video and audio similar to image tags, using instead of anything else. You’ll probably need to add a bit of extra code to get the video working for older browsers that don’t support HTML5, but even then that’s only five or six lines of extra code. Now you can finally enhance your content without a ton of confusing code.
Location Support
Taking a step from mobile devices, HTML5 fully supports geolocation. This can help in many ways. For example, if the customer is trying to figure out how much they’ll pay for shipping to get an item shipped to them, it’ll skip the multiple menus asking for location that they’d have to sit through otherwise. HTML5 will utilize whatever it can to get a user’s location  your wireless network connection, the GPS on your phone, your IP address, etc. You can, of course, allow the user to disable this feature should they want to do so.
The Storage of Content
The way content is cached for later viewing is unique with HTML5. It’s sort of like the older cookies method, combined with cloud storage. The data will still be there even after the browser is closed. You don’t have to worry about deleting cookies. Storing data in the browser means you can cache data and load previous data, which will reduce overall load times.
Games!
Developing games for HTML5 is a breeze thanks to the [canvas] tag. It’ll be a lot easier to troubleshoot any issues you have thanks to HTML5’s way of displaying code. There are quite a few tutorials about how to develop games in HTML5, using examples that make use of CSS and jQuery.
Everything Supports It
HTML5 was designed with everyone in mind and it shows  it’s supported by Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and even Internet Explorer. Even though older browsers support it, some won’t be able to display certain aspects of HTML5. Fortunately, you can just add a Javascript shiv to allow those items to be displayed on older browsers.
When it comes to developing your website, there are a ton of directions you can go. HTML5 should be the first thing that you consider. Not only does it work across all desktop browsers, but most mobile browsers support it as well. Stop alienating your audience and clean up your code by adopting HTML5.
Have you seen an increase in traffic since using HTML5? Leave a comment and let us know!
