New technology provides web designers with more tools to display information. The World Wide Consortium (W3C) is working with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Work Group (WHATWG) on developing the standards for HTML5, instead of renewing their XHTML 2.0 charter¹.

Web designers are eagerly awaiting the release of HTML5 for its new capabilities:

• New HTML tags include <nav> for a website navigation block, and <footer> for the bottom part of the page, where usually the copyright information is placed.
• The use of the <audio> and <video> tags will replace the <object> tag for embedding multimedia objects.
• Dependence on Cascading Style Sheets for defining the presentational aspects of the page have caused the <font> and <center> tags to be obsolete, and will therefore be dropped from the HTML list.
• New APIs include tools for 2D context for immediate drawing, timed media playback of multimedia, offline storage of data, online document editing, drag-and-drop capabilities, cross-document and channel messaging, and microdata.

Combined with CSS3 and JQuery, HTML5 websites will be able to present information with more animation, more effects, and more eye candy. Still, content is king, and web sites are for visitors to access information, not for web designers indulge themselves for the sake of using new tools. The visitors of these websites will navigate the website not necessarily by going from page to page, but by building out a single page as needed. This means the page can start small, at the concept level, and as the visitor drills through the site, layers will emerge on the page, building vertically or horizontally as needed. Yes, the horizontal scrollbar can now be embraced as an ergonomic tool for navigation. When visitors return to the page, they should be able to return to the same state of the page in which they left it.

Visitors to a website will therefore take more control of how they organize their information. Community-oriented platforms, like Facebook and Twitter are leading the charge in developing true multi-way communication among themselves and the development team.

Design of the page will therefore trend toward larger typefaces for content most relevant to the visitor. Both titles and text will be bolder and more prominent. As the visitor's attention is drawn to other aspects of the website, that newly-focused content will take on the larger font size as the former text decreases its font size. It will be analgous to reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass, or reading a microfiche.

Web developers, these features present an exciting time for the web community. Prepare your websites now for these new standards to make the transition to HTML5 less painful. Review you code to ensure it is well formed:

• Do all of your paired open tags have a corresponding close tag?
• Are all of your non-paired tags (e.g., <br> and <img>) marked as closed (e.g., <br /> and <img />, respectively)?
• Have you replaced deprecated tags, like <font> and <center> with <div> or <span> elements with CSS formatting?

Check your websites with the W3C validators for HTML and CSS validation to ensure your websites are well-formed.