HTML5

When it comes the the world wide web, HTML5 seems to be the obvious way forward, we have been hearing about it for years and although all mainstream browsers support it to various extents it is still under development and it will likely be years until its specifications are agreed upon and finalized as a standard.

HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard where not only are web-designers and developers are allowed to resume working on all previous functionality offered through HTML4 but also natively include standard APIs which when thinking back should have been implemented decades ago.

A case in point is video streaming, for the past decade we have all been viewing online streamed videos mainly on youtube through Flash, this makes no technical sense, flash was intended for embed-able interactive animations, was then creatively used to create online games which finally lead to video streaming. The only reason all the big companies started streaming videos through Flash was because there was no other option, a huge percentage of the internet population had flash installed and therefor was their only option. With HTML5 gone are the days of using proprietary software, downloading and installing plugins only to view mediocre video quality. The <video> tag is all you need, and it is already bundled up with most mainstream browsers.

Another case in point is storage, for as long as I can remember us developers had to make due with cookies to provide our users with a feeling of "stateful-ness" over a stateless protocol where every page flowed smoothly to the next page as if they're using a simple application. Because of the limitations available when using cookies (KBs) we would bounce off a unique session id in a cookie with each request to the server for the server to know who the request is coming from and in what state the client (browser) is. Not only is this very insecure, the entire state for each client has to be maintained on the server. With HTML5 the browser has access to various MBs of storage for each domain name (depends on browser) which not only can be used to store client state but also allow for temporary offline availability to the application. Not only does this allow development for much smother applications it also shifts the state from the server down to the client effectively shifting some of the load which should have never have been on the server back down to the client. This results in fewer HTTP requests to the server allowing the server to serve more clients on the same hardware. A win-win situation.

Some obviously missing APIs have also been included, we have all seen tons of java-script code to add drag-and-drop functionality to a web application, which although one can find some good implementations such as the jQuery framework the overhead involved for such a nowadays common way of interacting with a computer. HTML5 provides an API just for drag-and-drop operations allowing for less javascript and more browser compatibility.

Speaking about compatibility, we were all introduced to a neat little site which will rate your current browser from 0 to 400 depending on how much of HTML5 is already supported. Chrome 12 ranked 314

Whilst my iPhone's safari browser ranked 217 which is not bad for a mobile browser.

Some other widely spoken about HTML5 APIs include

• Canvas - allowing for 2d drawing
• Cross Document Messaging - allowing for messaging between different open pages
• Microdata - enhancing the contents on the page to aid search engines and crawlers to easily parse and index the pages.

I'm sure there are hundreds of other interesting features and APIs offered by HTML5 and if I had to list them all this blog post will run into tens of thousands of words and I would never be able to push the "PUBLISH POST" just below the blogger editor ;)