Top HTML5 sites of 2012 highlighted

If you're looking to set up a website on a server, these days it's clear one of the best solutions is to take advantage of HTML5 technology. Over the last year, this has taken some huge leaps forward, driven by better support from the latest web browsers and a push by the World Wide Web Consortium to raise awareness and improve its capabilities.

There's so much you can do with HTML5 to make your site stand out, but with such a range of features available, where do you start? If this is something you're wondering, perhaps you might like to take a look at a few of the sites that have been highlighted by web developer publication .net magazine as some of the finest examples of the technology.

HTML5 as a development standard

The publication picked out several major sites from around the world that used HTML5 successfully from the ground up as the standard for their site. These included barackobama.com, the home page for the US president's re-election campaign. "Built by a team of industry vets, it uses semantic elements, data- attributes and schema.org and is built on HTML5 Boilerplate," .net stated. If you want to see how to make a clean, easy to navigate site, this was said to be a great example.
Eslewher, the UK government was praised for its Gov.uk site, which aimed to bring information and services from all its departments under one portal. Frontend developer of the project James Weiner observed: "HTML5 is where everything is going, so it was the logical choice."

Multimedia and interactivity

However, some of the key benefits of using HTMLs are its multimedia capabilities and the way it can seamlessly integrate interactive elements into a web page due to tools such as Web Audio API and WebGL. Websites highlighted by .net for the way they do this included music app JAM with Chrome and online game HexGL, a browser-based project based on the famous Wipeout title.
The publication added 2012 saw HTML5 become undeniably the new standard for web design and predicted this is only set to improve. It stated: "We're just getting started: expect 2013 to rock the browser even harder than this year. It's a great time to be developing for the web."