HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
chapter 1
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Overview of HTML5 and
ASP.NET 4.5
Until recently, ASP.NET developers didn't need to bother much about the version number of HTML—and
now suddenly everybody is talking about HTML5! That's the kind of impact the evolved HTML standards
will have on the web pages we develop now and in the future. Of course, the old functionality provided by
traditional HTML (such as HTML 4.01) isn't going away. The previous version is an integral part of HTML5,
but the new improvements offered by HTML5 are appealing to any ASP.NET developer.
This chapter gives you a quick overview of HTML5 features. It also explains how HTML5 and ASP.NET
fit into a web application. An overview of the ASP.NET web stack and step-by-step tour of project creation
in Visual Studio give you a quick brush-up of your ASP.NET skills.
This chapter specifically covers:
• A brief history of HTML5
• HTML5 page layout
• New markup tags
• HTML5 programmable features
• Where and how HTML5 its in an ASP.NET application
History of HTML5
To understand the magic behind the number 5, it would be worthwhile to peek into the history and
inspiration behind the evolution of HTML standards over a decade. If you've been designing web pages
since the early days of the Web, you'll recollect that back then, a web page was basically a collection of
static HTML elements. Web pages lacked the interactivity, responsiveness, and complexity you see today.
The old HTML was merely a set of markup tags that web developers and designers used to create web
pages. It was also careless about the strictness of the markup.
After completing the majority of work on HTML 4, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) decided to
develop a standard—XHTML—for HTML markup. The XHTML specifications introduced strict rules for
HTML markup such as requiring that start tags have corresponding end tags, tags be properly nested, and
so on. These rules were introduced with good intentions and were appreciated by the developer
community. However, it became apparent that nobody wanted to give up web pages developed using the
