CHAPTER 1 was in 2005 when the draft specification for Web Applications 1.0 was released, by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), 3 that the story begins to get interesting. Both HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 (with 2.0 in draft) were created before today s concepts of blogs, online shops, and forums really took hold. The problem with these versions was that they were built to mark up static documents, which blogs and online shops are not ­ they are essentially applications. Web Applications 1.0 was created to solve this problem ­ to provide an extension to HTML that accommodated these types of websites by adding new elements (the tags used to mark up content) and functionality. By 2008, Web Applications 1.0 blossomed, was adopted by the W3C, and turned into the first draft of the HTML5 specification. It introduced a raft of new and powerful features that we ll discuss in more detail throughout this book. So after a brief glimpse into the past, we arrive at the present. HTML5 is now in a working draft form and is changing as we speak. It s technically unfinished and will stay that way for some time to come; a working draft is one step above a draft, but it s only the third step out of six. 3 However, the good news is that parts of HTML5 are already being built into a variety of browsers, allowing us to use these exciting features right now. There is really no reason for any decent Web designer or programmer not to look at HTML5. It is, put simply, the future of the Web. Do you really want to be left behind while everyone else is having such good fun? Why is HTML5 needed?