Use of html5 in web app

I have a web app which has standard things for learning based app like student reg, teacher reg, assignments, lessons, content, reports, etc

This uses Java in the middle tier.

We are planning to redesign this app which would开发者_运维问答 mainly mean changes in presentation layer. Now we plan to havr the same html work on both desktop and iPad, through adaptive css...i am completely aware of the css stuff..media queries and all.

My question is should i use html5 for the new pages..i have not used it much..but wanted to know what benefits does it offer apart from the standard audio, video support and the obvious things.

I have a lot of AJAX calls in my app. Will html5 help in any way for that?

I wanted to know some good reasons for using html5, given the same page is going to render with slight differences on desktop vs iPad.

Ajax is javascript and has nothing to do with HTML(5) beyond access to things like the canvas element. You can choose to use, or not use, any of the newer elements of HTML5 and continue doing whatever you're doing in every category and not notice the difference. So I don't know what you mean by "using HTML5". You use the new elements or you don't. There isn't really anything to "switch" to.

HTML5 will allow you to use the semantic HTML5 tags, and if you care about validating your HTML to a W3C Standard, HTML5 allows things that XHTML/HTML4 didn't - such as a using anchors as block-level elements.

There is plenty of material on the subject.