Web and is one of the most exciting developments to happen to the web and the web
community in a long time. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language that
has been at the heart of all web documents since its conception in the early 1990s.
HTML 4.01 and HTML5 is the addition of many JavaScript APIs (Application Programming
Interfaces) to the specification. Of course, one of these specifications is
directly relevant to the subject of this book—the API that allows interactions with
multimedia elements within the browser. As well as these new APIs, HTML5 also
alters the meaning of some existing HTML elements, removes others, and more
important, adds new ones—some of which allow you to provide more semantic
meaning to your content.
It’s worthwhile noting that most of these new elements don’t actually add any
new functionality that you’ve not seen before.
But before you dive into the workings of HTML5, let’s first look at where HTML5
came from and how it evolved.
