By now, everyone in the industry, regardless their area of expertise, will have heard about HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext markup language, the structural skeleton of the design of the Internet.

HTML5 might mean different things to different people

Accessibility consultants are enthusiastic about the addition of more meaningful mark-up elements. These should improve the way people using assistive technology navigate websites.

SEO specialists are also looking closely at the development of HTML5, as Google, one of the big players participating in this movement, will start paying more attention to those sites coded with HTML5’s more descriptive elements.

Marketing people might soon start using the word “HTML5” for selling purposes in the same way that not so long ago they overused, and at times misused, the word “web 2.0”.

Developers are excited about new HTML5 API’s like Video and Audio, the element, which allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes, and Geolocation amongst others.

But what will HTML5 mean to user experience professionals?

Better forms

Forms are those bits of a page users and developers alike need and hate. HTML5 offers enhanced forms with improvements to text inputs, search boxes and other fields and provides better controls for validating data, focusing and interaction with other elements on the page.

With HTML5, widgets like date-pickers and sliders are now part of the language. That means no extra JavaScript is required to create them because the browser will handle that itself.

This is great news for users, even if they aren’t aware. Users expect form elements to look consistent across sites. They don’t want to learn a new look and feel for a drop down or a set of checkboxes. This consistency can now be brought to these new widgets. How many date-picker implementations currently out there don’t behave the way we might expect them? These new elements can also be navigated with the keyboard. That’s an improvement in the user experience.

Better mobile experience

HTML5 is a dream come true for mobile use. It enables a richer mobile web experience for the user – and across platforms, without requiring new versions for each type of mobile platform.

Producing sites that are usable across different devices, including mobile phones has been in some cases a wearing task as lots of unreliable “sniffing” needs to be done to identify a device and serve different content accordingly.

The development of HTML5 is linked closely with the development of the latest version of CSS (CSS3), the technical layer that defines the look and feel of a HTML document.

CSS3 introduces “media queries” which help identify the screen size of the device rendering a page and let designers with the same content decide which way to present it to the user based on their device’s capabilities.

While it’s not perfect, HTML 5 might just be the step you need to decrease the time and cost of developing across devices.

So when are we all going to enjoy everything that HTML 5 has to offer?

Most modern browsers, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera already support most of the features proposed on the first draft. The forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 is the first serious attempt by Microsoft to start supporting HTML5.

HTML 5 is a major improvement over the previous markup but there is still work to be done. While most of us will get to enjoy the adoption of some of these great features, a total widespread implementation is likely to take few years as the proposed features evolve over time.