HTML vs HTML5: What’s The Difference?
- Kavindu S. Liyanage
- Feb 2, 2023
- 2 min read

HTML vs HTML5. What’s the big difference? If you’re looking to get into front-end development, you need to know the difference. It can be especially confusing because some people may use the two terms interchangeably, but they’re technically two different things — though they’re also related.
Let’s go over the differences between HTML vs HTML5, which is better, and what’s changed with the popular markup language’s biggest update.
What is HTML?
HTML is an acronym of Hypertext Markup Language; Let’s Break up the full form and understand it word by word. Hypertext in HTML is used to represent the web pages linked together and markup language represents text documents. It’s a markup language created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993, this was the first version of HTML. HTML is called the language of the Web as HTML is used to create web pages and websites. We use HTML tags to define the look and feel of a website. With an understanding of tags of HTML and knowledge of how to put them together, we can create beautiful website layouts easily.
What is HTML5?
HTML5 is the 5th version of HTML version 1.0 with support for more tags and features. Technically it’s termed HTML version 5.0, but colloquially it’s called HTML5. It was introduced in 2008 by two separate groups: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).
Comparison of HTML and HTML5

In addition, HTML5 has seen the following changes.
Some removed elements, like isindex, noframes, acronym, applet, basefont, dir, font, frame, frameset, big, center, strike, and tt.
New form controls, including dates and times, email, number, range, tel, url, search, color, and datalist.
Numerous new elements, including video, nav, aside, progress, canvas, section, meter, and time.
New APIs with various functionalities such as drag-and-drop support, browser history manipulation, and reading and locking screen orientation state.
New attributes including async, manifest, sandbox, srcdoc, and reversed.
New global attributes, such as hidden, role, spellcheck, and translate.
Conclusion
We are now aware of how different HTML and HTML5 are. In simple terms, HTML is a hypertext markup language that is used to create web pages and websites (combination of web pages) which is introduced in the year 1993 by Tim Berners-Lee whereas HTML5 is also a hypertext markup language but it is upgraded and the latest version of HTML introduced in 2008 with some additional features like support for audio and video with the help of their specified tags and many more functionalites like enabling drag and drop feature, running javascript in background. Overall, both HTML and HTML5 are markup languages. HTML5 simply has some added features since it is an upgraded version.
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