HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. It reached W3C Recommendation status on October 28, 2014, after years of parallel development between the W3C and the WHATWG. The specification describes itself as “the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web,” and it was shaped, in its own words, by “research into prevailing authoring practices” rather than by committee design alone.
The most visible additions were native multimedia and graphics. The audio and video elements let pages play sound and film directly, with source and track elements for formats and captions, while the canvas element provided a scriptable drawing surface for dynamic graphics. Together these meant rich media no longer required browser plugins.
HTML5 also added new semantic elements such as article, section, nav, header, footer, and aside to describe document structure more meaningfully, along with new form input types like email, date, number, range, and color and built-in validation. Beyond markup, it brought scripting APIs including geolocation, web storage, and offline application support, turning the browser into a capable application platform.
These capabilities are widely credited with ending the era of proprietary plugins. Once browsers could play video, draw graphics, and run sophisticated applications natively, the case for Flash and similar technologies collapsed, and the open web standard took their place.