Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday: HTML5. Why should I care?
Because HTML5 will be all kinds of rad and revolutionize the basic building blocks of the web – while at the same time creating a better web experience for everyone. “OK, great,” you say, “but how will it be all kinds of rad?” There is no need for future tense. The future is now! Most browsers currently support a subset of HTML5. Download that latest version of Google Chrome and check out these experiments. Then, download the latest Firefox browser and check out this radular display of awesome.
None of the glorious animation and audio goodness from the links above use any type of plugins. It’s all in the browser using HTML5. Animation, audio and data retrieval – all done using scripting. The drawing is done natively using the new canvas tag, which is exactly what it sounds like – a canvas that you can draw on. Only instead of a paintbrush you have JavaScript. Starting to get it now?
There is even a new video tag that could alleviate the need for Flash and Sliverlight based video players. There may be a slight conflict of interest there, explaining why Microsoft has yet to support the video tag in its latest version of IE8. Nevertheless, full adoption of HTML5 is bound to happen, and when it does get ready for an intensely magical web experience.
This is the stuff that Tim Berners-Lee couldn’t even have dreamed of back in 1989 while trying to help physicists at CERN reference research papers. How cool is that that we’ve come this far? HTML 4 has been out for 10 years. In those 10 years, we’ve seen a drastic move from web pages to web applications through the Web 2.0 movement. The web application is at the heart of HTML5. With the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS and the increase of cloud computing and storage, there is no doubt that the web will continue to have a greater influence on the way we live and work.
