New technologies for web development

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of the new features of web technologies. The general idea of the new version of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), i.e. HTML5, and other tools presented in this paper is the formal specification and the establishment of uniform solutions for technologies and functionalities which have already been in use through various hacks and plug-ins proposed by web developers. Many of these functionalities will now be implemented in browsers. The applications can access these functionalities through newly defined application programming interfaces. The latter include support for multimedia, dynamic graphic rendering, geolocation, multithreading, local data storage etc. HTML5 also introduces semantic markup, which can be used for marking the document structure as well as its elements and data. The new version of HTML enforces strict separation of the page content from its style. The styling can only be done using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) language. The new CSS version, i.e. CSS3, has a modular structure, in which different modules define different styling features. The development cycles of the individual modules are independent as well as their support and implementation in various browsers.