Almost all digital content and digital learning uses HTML5. As HTML5 increasingly becomes the standard for display, you can future-proof your training materials—and your career—by learning this important markup language. But how to do you get started? ATD’s Essentials of Authoring with HTML 5 course can help.

To gain more insight, I recently spoke with Mark Lassoff, who facilitates this online course for HTML5 coding. Mark is the founder and president of LearnToProgram Media and Punk Learning. Mark’s company has taught more than 800,000 software, web, and mobile developers online, in the corporate classroom, and in secondary schools across the country. He is an in-demand speaker and has traveled the world to teach programming techniques and technologies, and has authored eight books on programming.

According to Mark, there several reasons why it’s important for practitioners in the L&D field to know HTML5. On the macro level, he explains, HTML5 is part of modern digital literacy and knowing the code “makes you a better consumer of digital content.” On the micro level, many authoring tools are writing HTML5 in the background so that learning materials can display on multiple browsers or mobile devices. Consequently, it’s “imperative on learning professionals to understand natively how our content is displayed and how to make it more responsive,” he says.

In fact, proper use and understanding of HTML5 allows you to create a scaffolding for content that enables effective display across a variety of environments and screen sizes. And that’s the focus of Essentials of Authoring with HTML 5, which teaches the components, syntax, and structure of the HTML5 markup language, as well as how to use the basics of digital design to create documents that are durable across different delivery channels and screen sizes.

For more insight on why learning HTML5 is important and what you can expect in this ATD Essentials course, listen to the complete podcast.