Should we use HTML 5 right now

Nowadays a new type of question is wandering in the mind of people- should they use html 5 for their website building purposes? Some doubt that this new version of html will simply revolutionize the website building whereas some feel html 5 has to walk a long distance to become friendly to all the browsers! So, now you must be thinking, what is the main scenario then? If you are planning to build a website should you use html 5 or you go by the present proven markup languages available – html 4 or the XHTML!

Actually working as a freelance graphic designer, I do face this situation and I try to make the clients understand that we have to embrace the future technologies or improvements coming in the ways of website development – we should apply html 5 for the creation of the new -age web pages, however, it is still in the labs to come out of the greatest issue – browser compatibility.

Now let us see how still we can use html 5 in our website creation and there may be some benefit on its use. Hope this will help you understand or clear the doubt on html 5:

• We may use html 5 as it is coming with new elements that simply provides the coders with facility to use semantic tags. For example, in the html 4 and even in xhtml there was no tag like "header", "footer", "nav" and others. To use these tags the use of CSS was the easy and best possible way. But now coders can use the html 5 and directly code these elements and markup will be cleaner.
• Coders may use html 5 to get one of the exciting features of this html version – web forms. Now in creating the web forms will be very easy and there will be less or no headache to write or copy paste the various Javascripts that may be blocked by some of the browsers (IE 6 or lower versions) and your visitors may see nothing but blank fields. Whereas, if coders use html 5 the browsers will show standard display text fields. Isn’t the coding getting easier and will be with some newer functionality for any type of web forms!
• There was no "article" tag in the html 4 or other versions. But now coders can use the html 5 and easily let the html represent any portion of the web page as a stand alone part for creating a blog post, forum entry space or commenting space against any content. This is really a great option and good benefit of html 5.
• Now on coders or the developers can use html 5 to apply any API to integrate audio files or video files directly and with great ease! With the advent of html 5 and its "video" and "audio" tag the coders are even getting the drag and drop facility in the process of integrating any API. The process is less time consuming and clean.
• The mobile version of the websites has gone almost unavoidable as the surfing of the web through the latest smart phones has gone really a habit among everyone of us. And the mobile applications as iphone , android applications now come with webkits to use the 3G and other telecom facilities for the users. And when you are trying to build the mobile version for your websites why do not you ask your developers to use html 5 with which the development will be much faster and easy.

The above are just a few instance of effective use of html 5! In this way there are quite a good number of reasons to use html 5. There may be some issues against browser compatibility of html 5 but slowly the popular browsers are accepting the fifth version of html. And hopefully within coming two or three years the older version of Internet Explorer (IE 6 and the lower ones) will be completely obsolete and the entire browser community is going to accept html 5. Finally, you may be having a desire to use the html 5 for making your site future ready, carefully choose the developers or the designers for your website projects. When you are making the choice and looking into the web or graphic design portfolio, check out the live sites to get confirmed if he or she knows how to use the html 5.