HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and current version of the HTML standard. It was published in October 2014 by the World Wide Web Consortium to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia, while keeping it both easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices such as web browsers, parsers, etc.

With the advent of smart-phones era, things have completely changed and that change has effected or rather revolutionized the way websites are developed. Though, HTML4 is still a W3C standard for browser applications, it doesn’t fully cater to the changing trends of the computing industry. Therefore, HTML5 has been developed with intent to cop-up with these new challenges in web industry. HTML5 is more flexible, robust and advanced as compare to its older counterpart.

Multimedia Elements: HTML5 contains built in support for integrated multimedia files into web page via video and audio tags, which was integrated via third party plugins such as Silverlight and flash.

Accessing User Geographical location: Previously in HTML4, it was an extremely cumbersome task to get the geographical locations of the visitors visiting the site. It was even difficult when the website was accessed through mobile devices. On the other hand, in HTML5 is extremely easy to get the user location. HTML5’s JS GeoLocation can be leveraged to identify the location of the user accessing the website.

Client Side storage: In HTML4, in order to store important data on client side, browser’s cache was used. However, that cache is limited and doesn’t support relational storage mechanism. In HTML5, this issue has been addressed via Web SQL database and application cache that can be access via HTML5’s JavaScript interface.

Client Server Communication: In HTML4 the communication between the client and server was done through streaming and long polling, since there are no web sockets available in HTML4. On the contrary, HTML5 contains web sockets that allow full duplex communication between clients and servers.

Client Server Communication: In HTML4 the communication between the client and server was done through streaming and long polling, since there are no web sockets available in HTML4. On the contrary, HTML5 contains web sockets that allow full duplex communication between clients and servers.

JavaScript Threading Mechanism: In HTML4, JavaScript and the browser interface with which user interacts, run in the same thread which affects performance. HTML5 contains JS Web Worker API which allows JavaScript and Browser interface to run in separate threads.

<canvas> Tag is used to draw graphics using JavaScript.

<video> Tag is a new element which specifies a standard way to embed a video file on a web page. It supports Mp4, WebM, Ogg file formats.

<audio> Tag is a new element which specifies a standard way to embed an audio file on a web page. It supports Mp3, Wav, Ogg file formats.

<article> Tag shows the portion of a web page that contains a complete and independent material like a blog entry, any comment by user, or some other content item.

<main> Tag describes the material which is specific to only that document. It can be used only one time in a page.

<mark> Tag allows you to highlight text in a webpage.