Teaching HTML5

For the past few years I’ve been teaching XHTML in my web design class at Sint-Lukas Brussels. This year I will start teaching HTML5. I think this is the next logical step to take in education. My students will graduate three years from now. By that time HTML5 will have gained more popularity and the specification will have reached the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage. I think students will benefit from learning HTML5 when they start to work in a few years.

I also think that students should be able to write XHTML documents. Comparing both languages from time to time should help. I will also teach them to use XML/XHTML syntax in HTML5:

• All code should be lowercase
• Attributes need quotes
• Use a trailing slash on empty elements

While teaching HTML5, I will also cover things like basic SEO, accessibility, usability and the techniques to implement them.

I’ve read two good books on HTML5: HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith and Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. Both are great if you allready know HTML 4 or XHTML. But they are hard to understand for beginners. I’ll write some articles here on my blog that cover the basics of HTML5 to have some reference material to use in class.