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CHAPTER 1: Overview of HTML5 > A New Vision
A New Vision
HTML5 is based on various design principles, spelled out in the WHATWG specification, that truly embody a new vision of possibility and practicality.
- Compatibility
- Utility
- Interoperability
- Universal access
Compatibility and Paving the Cow Paths
Don’t worry; HTML5 is not an upsetting kind of revolution. In fact, one of its core principles is to keep everything working smoothly. If HTML5 features are not supported, the behavior must degrade gracefully. In addition, since there is about 20 years of HTML content out there, supporting all that existing content is important.
A lot of effort has been put into researching common behavior. For example, Google analyzed millions of pages to discover the common ID and Class names for DIV tags and found a huge amount of repetition. For example, many people used DIV id="header" to mark up header content. HTML5 is all about solving real problems, right? So why not simply create a <header> element?
