Is HTML5 the Best Choice for Responsive Website Design?

The huge popularity of smartphones, tablets and phablets has made the web landscape complex. It has become essential for each business to create responsive websites to keep the visitors engaged by delivering solid web experience. Along with being highly responsive, the website also needs to be compatible with both conventional and mobile devices.

So website designers use a variety of tools to make the website accessible on different types of devices. Many web programmers, nowadays, use HTML5 to make the websites and web applications work on multiple devices. HTML5 has further made it easier for developers to create rich and responsive internet applications without putting any extra time and effort.

Why HTML5 is the Best Choice for Responsive Website Development?

Easy to Integrate a Variety of Content: To keep the visitors engaged, a website must be designed by integrating a wide variety of content. HTML5 enables website designers to integrate different types of content by using syntactical features like <audio>, <video> and <canvas>. Likewise, the semantic value of a document can also be enhance by using tags like <article>, <section>, <nav>, and header. As the graphic and multimedia content can be integrated with the website without using any third party plug-ins, the website can be accessed by users on any device.

Elegant Forms: Most websites interact with visitors through forms. HTML5 makes it easier for website designers to enhance the user interface by using fancier forms. Further, the user input can be validated through HTML. The native form validations make the website accessible on browsers without relying on JavaScript. Also, the programmers have option to capture different types of user inputs for search and form.

Cross Browser Compatibility: The performance of a responsive website is also affected by its compatibility with widely used web browsers. At present, HTML5 is supported by some of the hugely popular web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 9. The developers also have option to define doctype to make the tags recognizable for old browsers. However, the older versions of certain web browsers still do not recognize new HTML tags. But the web developers can simply add JavaScript shiv to make the website compatible with older browsers. The enhanced compatibility makes websites more responsive and interactive across browsers.

Efficient Option to Place Cookies: Most responsive websites use cookies to track unique user data. But the cookie data are added to the HTTP request headers. It also results in increased response time. HTML5 allows users to reduce cookie size through two storage options, i.e., sessionStorage and localStorage. Despite not being a permanent database, these storage options can be used effectively to store structured data temporarily. Thus, the website will become more responsive due to the efficient use of cookies.

Geolocation API: To become highly responsive, a website must figure out the current location of the user. The location of a user can be determined based on his wireless internet connection, IP address or the cell phone tower his mobile device is talking to. Some web browsers are even designed with dedicated GPS hardware to capture the location of the user through satellites. The web developers can use HTML5 geolocation APIs to make the HTML5-compatible browser-based application capture the current location of the users. So it becomes easier for the website to keep the user engaged by delivering the most relevant content.

Improve User Experience through Native APIs: Each responsive website needs to enable users to interact with the content, while responding to them effectively. HTML5 makes it easier for developers to build more interactive and responsive websites by using several native APIs. For instance, they can use the drawing HTML tag <canvas> to make the website more responsive. Likewise, they can further use native APIs like timed media playback, offline storage database, document editing, browser history management, and drag and drop.

However, it is also important for the web programmers to keep in mind the shortcomings of HTML5. They also need to explore ways to enhance the responsiveness of websites by addressing these features. The developer can still rely on HTML5 to optimize the accessibility and performance of websites without writing complex code. To get maximum benefits of HTML5, you may consider hiring services of a HTML5 development company.

We provide HTML5 QA and testing services. If you would like to hire HTML5 developers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.