With the latest buzz by Apple on a few new interesting tidbits of information about HTML 5, the web development community was presented with some alluring and somewhat provoking uses of HTML 5. The API at its most basic foundation is used to expand on a users interaction with a website – by expanding on the capability of what a simple video, image or even a div tag can do.

Web design used to be simple, a few blocks of text, and maybe an image or two; but that was when Netscape was still a browser and not a throwback of the past. Although Netscape moved on to become Firefox, the idea of web design also transformed over time.

With the movement from HTML 4 to HTML 5, web design took a step towards the future. I remember being amazed back in the 1990s of seeing video and animated images creep into web design. Although the use of animated images took off and became the cliché of the decade, it did speak to a larger idea – multimedia was becoming the de-facto user experience on the web.

After YouTube was created in 2005, multimedia was solidified as the primary source for immersion and fun on the web. And now with the integration of social media and interactive media, we’ve come full circle for immersion on the web.

HTML 5 offers a variety of newer web features for web design, APIs that allow advanced media playback, document editing (a la Google Docs, for example), the ability to draw on a 2D canvas (and support for dynamic images), web messaging and more.

With the move from HTML 4 to 5 new rules were also introduced. Added was the ability to use inline SVG, MathML, new elements such as article, audio, canvas, footer, header, and new attributes such as ping and charset – deprecated elements include applet, center, font, and noframes, for example. HTML 5 also allows old browsers to ignore the newer attributes – for a bit more compliance. For a more complete list of the changes from HTML 4 to 5, see dev.w3.org.