meera pankhania

With all the HTML 5 release excitement I really wanted to jump straight into it and get my hands dirty, thankfully I had that opportunity at ID Media London, a Digital Communications Agency I work for as an Interface Architect. The project is a campaign-based micro-site for Cockpit Arts – Makerdifference – A great yet simple design by Kevin Healy (@kevka).

I took the little downtime I had during this project to get my head around HTML 5 and it really wasnt too bad, taking full advantage of the new tags available:

• section:  A part or chapter in a book, a section in a chapter, or essentially anything that has its own heading in HTML 4
• header:  The page header shown on the page; not the same as the head element
• footer:  The page footer where the fine print goes; the signature in an e-mail message
• nav:  A collection of links to other pages
• article:  An independent entry in a blog, magazine, compendium, and so forth

The markup is so much more cleaner and easy to workout what belongs where, for example you don’t need to create a <div id=”nav”> tag for the navigation. I ran into some issues with IE (who doesn’t!) with enabling the new tags, but quickly found a work around via Snipplr.

Also consistently refered to Bruce Lawson’s articles on HTML 5 (which are excellent!) and the random Tweet here and there for great advice (@brucel) – Thanks for that Bruce!

I really enjoyed working with HTML 5 and looking forward to integrating ARIA with HTML 5 too and the consistent improvement for web accessibility.

A big thank you to HTML5 Gallery to listing Cockpit Arts on their website.