HTML5 is still being finalized and although it will be several years before it becomes the standard verion of HTML used across the internet there are plenty of sites starting to use the new markup – an obvious example is YouTube using the <video> tag on some of it’s pages to show video without needing Flash… For the most part we won’t need to worry about HTML5 until IE9 has been released and IE6/7 has disappeared or at least drops to a sufficiently low level to not worry about but it’s worth thinking about now – with the launch of the iPad, HTML5 is getting talked about a lot more.

Some of the main differences between HTML5 and HTML4 is that there are new elements eg. <section> <header> <footer> <article>. Each of these elements are designed to contain certain parts of the web document to allow for easier accessibility – and no doubt the big search engines are already working out how best to read HTML5 sites and use the data to optimize their results.

What is HTML 5?
HTML5 is currently under development as the next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. The new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears.

What is HTML Video?
HTML5 video is an element introduced in the HTML5 draft specification for the purpose of playing videos or movies[1], partially replacing the object element.

As of May 2010[update], Adobe Flash Player was widely used to embed video on web sites such as YouTube, since the majority of web browsers had Adobe’s Flash Player installed (with controversial exceptions such as the browser on the Apple iPhone and iPad). HTML5 video is intended by its creators to become the new standard way to show video online, but has been hampered by lack of agreement as to which video formats should be supported in the video tag.