Learning HTML 5: HTML Design Principal and New Tags

HTML 5 is the new version after HTML4.01. HTML4.01 was released in 1999 and since then the Web has been changed to a very large extent.
 
To embrace the changes of the new web, HTML 5 came as a new standard. HTML5 is a joint venture of W3C and WHATWG to standardize the web and that would be supported by all the browsers.

Design principals of HTML5

You can read the HTML 5 Design Principles here. I have made a gist out of that document and summarized a few of the important points below,

1. Support for existing content. For example a document written in a previous version of HTML should be rendered exactly the same and can be processed as HTML5 document.
    
2. Unbroken Error handling. For example the way existing HTML is handling broken tags, HTML 5 should handle the errors in the same way.
    
3. Design features to be accessible to users with disabilities. For example blind user cannot see Image. So with the img tag there should be provision of alternate text.
    
4. Any feature should be independent of the devices and media.
    
5. If there is already popular technology being used for a particular purpose uses that rather creating new one for the same purpose.
    
6. If there is already a particular practice is popular uses that rather than obsoleting that and forcing to adhere to new practice. For example <br/> tag.
    
7. Support classical and existing HTML syntax
    
8. Ensure that any new feature will adhere to web security standard.
    
9. Feature should provide simple solutions over complex solutions
    
10. Error handling should be there for interoperable implementation
     
11. There should be more markups and markup should be replacing scripts as much as possible.
     
12. For media usage of external plugins should be minimal.

Newly introduced tags in HTML 5

• Article
• Aside
• Audio
• Canvas
• Command
• Datalist
• Details
• Embed
• Figcaption
• Figure
• Footer
• Header
• Hgroup
• Keygen
• Mark
• Meter
• Nav
• Output
• Progress
• Rp
• Rt
• Ruby
• Section
• Source
• Summary
• Time
• Video
• Wbr