HTML5

HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final[3] major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML Living Standard. It is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a consortium of the major browser vendors (Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft).

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HTML5
(HTML Living Standard)

Filename extension	.html, .htm
Internet media type	text/html
Type code	TEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)	public.html[1]
Developed by	WHATWG World Wide Web Consortium (W3C; formerly)
Initial release	22 January 2008 (15 years ago) (2008-01-22)[2]
Type of format	Markup language
Standard	HTML LS
Open format?	Yes

HTML5 was first released in a public-facing form on 22 January 2008,[2] with a major update and "W3C Recommendation" status in October 2014.[4][5] Its goals were to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia and other new features; to keep the language both easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices such as web browsers, parsers, etc., without XHTML's rigidity; and to remain backward-compatible with older software. HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4 but also XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML.[6]

HTML5 includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves, and rationalizes the markup available for documents and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications.[7] For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a candidate for cross-platform mobile applications because it includes features designed with low-powered devices in mind.

Many new syntactic features are included. To natively include and handle multimedia and graphical content, the new <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements were added; expandable sections are natively implemented through <summary>...</summary> and <details>...</details> rather than depending on CSS or JavaScript; and support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) content and MathML for mathematical formulas was also added. To enrich the semantic content of documents, new page structure elements such as <main>, <section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <nav>, and <figure> are added. New attributes were introduced, some elements and attributes were removed, and others such as <a>, <cite>, and <menu> were changed, redefined, or standardized. The APIs and Document Object Model (DOM) are now fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification,[7] and HTML5 also better defines the processing for any invalid documents.[8]