There's still a fair amount of time before HTML 5 is regularly seen on the world wide web. But it's worth taking a closer look at some of the changes that are coming, and how they may benefit your ecommerce website.
What New Elements Are In HTML 5?
Most of the new elements in HTML 5 are directly related to content structure and information types. The new content structure types include <section>, <article>, <aside>, <hgroup>, <nav>, and <figure>. New information type elements include <video>, <audio>, <meter>, <time>,<details>, and <summary>. There are many others, but these elements are particularly likely to be useful in ecommerce.
When Can I Use HTML 5?
With the separation of structure from presentation as the preferred method to build a website – CSS and HTML, as you may have heard it described – it really doesn't matter in any significant way whether most browsers support these elements, with a few unsurprising exceptions.
For the most part, using HTML 5 elements requires nothing more than declaring some styles for them in your cascading style sheets. The one little exception is that Internet Explorer doesn't acknowledge CSS declarations for any element it doesn't already recognize. As a result, a small amount of JavaScript is required to make Internet Explorer recognize the elements. This article isn't really the place to go into how to provide this ability, or how to style new elements with CSS.
There's nothing in HTML 5 which you can apply today to shoot your website to the top of the marketplace. Anything you do is likely to take years to have sufficient market penetration to make a huge difference. But, as you know already, demand drives development. There are enough benefits to HTML 5 down the road that it's well worth demanding support from your vendors and developers.
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