How HTML5 Will Change the Web 208
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond the codec and plug-in wars to examine nine areas where HTML5 will have a significant impact on Web development. From enabling more interactive graphics, to tapping local file storage, to geolocation, HTML5 is rife with rich capabilities — and may even improve our ability to secure applications delivered via the Web, Wayner writes. But the most important impact of HTML5 will be its ability to simplify Web development itself: 'HTML5 offers one language (JavaScript), one data model (XML and DOM), and one set of layout rules (CSS) to bind text, audio, video, and graphics. The challenge of making something beautiful is still immense, but it's simpler to work with a unified standard.'"
As always... (Score:5, Informative)
summary wrong on two counts about "one language" (Score:5, Informative)
ahh, the summary is wrong both from a W3C DOM standards perspective, because java is listed as the 2nd language supported by the W3C. the summary is wrong from a second perspective in that language bindings to HTML5-compliant web browser engines such as XulRunner and WebKit have been available for years. if Microsoft actually intend also to follow the HTML5 process properly, then it can be said that MSHTML, through its COM interface, also offers other language alternatives for decades rather than just years.
now it's a sad fact that nobody really *knows* that you can get at HTML5-compliant web browser engines and use DOM functions (3000+) and access DOM properties (20,000+) through XPCOM, or Glib/Gobject or COM, but it's perfectly possible. the best demonstration of this at its most extreme limit, taking advantage of absolutely all HTML5 W3C DOM features, is the http://pyjs.org/ [pyjs.org] pyjamas project, which abstracts the differences between these three major web browser engine types (XulRunner, Webkit and MSHTML aka Trident) and presents a single uniform API. on top this uniform API, normalising the discrepancies between the three engine types, an entire Desktop GUI Widget Set API has been created.
so the statement that there is "one HTML5 language: javascript" is just nonsense. for further examples of accessing HTML5 DOM using python, some of which will lead through to links to Ruby accessing HTML5 DOM such as AppCelerator, see http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming [python.org]
Re:One standard does not mean one interpretation (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, HTML5 really makes the whole situation worse too, because rather than being a forward thinking spec, it takes everything that's been done wrong over the years, and makes it part of the standard. Then it adds in a load more stuff that appears half thought through (the video tag that doesn't do what it was originally intended for- standardised video), the semantic section tags, which only cover a tiny subset of the sections a site tends to have and which appears outdated before it's even launched (i.e. no comments section tags).
The ideology behind HTML5 is rather than create a new spec that tells people how things should be done, make a spec that takes everything bad people have done and make it standard, so that those incompetent developers are now adhering to the standard.
Overally it means more ambiguity, more jumble in the spec, stuff that might (has?) become obsolete before it's barely even used and that sort of thing.
HTML5 will change the web alright, back to the philosophy of hack it together any which way, who cares about lack of maintainbility, interoperability, accessibility and so forth. This seems an extremely backward way of doing things when web apps are getting ever more complex, and average Joes who publish are publishing via web apps anyway mitigating the need for them to get their hands dirty with markup.
HTML5 just doesn't come across as a professionally written spec, you compare it to other specs out there and it looks like it's been slapped together by a bunch of kids with no real experience of large scale software development.
Re:It Won't (Score:4, Informative)
They can't because some browsers (most notably Firefox and Opera) will not support H.264, yet nearly all of their content is already in H.264. Thats game over right there for YouTube converting to HTML5. Maybe in 5 years or more, and only when all major browsers support a single codec.
Re:It Won't (Score:4, Informative)
The answer is No, YouTube has not switched, and has no plans to switch, from Flash to HTML5.
They can't because some browsers (most notably Firefox and Opera) will not support H.264, yet nearly all of their content is already in H.264. Thats game over right there for YouTube converting to HTML5. Maybe in 5 years or more, and only when all major browsers support a single codec.
But Google is also offering (or is in the process of offering) all YouTube videos as WebM [webmproject.org], and the next versions of Firefox and Opera will have WebM support, and the dev channel of Chrome already has it. They really want to switch to HMTL5. I'm sure at this point they'd prefer IE and Safari to support WebM as well, but obviously they have the storage to keep every video as H.264 and WebM.
Re:The one real data model: XML (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing stopping you from using well-formed XML in your HTML5, or serving your document as application/xhtml+xml (explicitly stated in the HTML5 spec). Serving HTML5 as proper XML is dubbed "XHTML 5". It uses the same doctype. All the new tags -- video, audio, section, header, etc. are supported, but obviously the lax markup features of HTML5 (like being able to omit most tags) no longer apply.
Re:It Won't (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The one real data model: XML (Score:4, Informative)
Yes it can. Firefox (at least) does so. If it gets to the end of the page and find it's invalid, THEN it throws up the error, even if it's already rendered part of it.
Re:The one real data model: XML (Score:3, Informative)
HTML can be loaded incrementally, XHTML can't, as you can only validate the document when you have all of it.
Sure you can. It's called a streaming parser [wikipedia.org], and SAX (for Java) started in 1997. This isn't exactly new technology. And in any case, parsing well-formed XML is always easier than hacking at tag soup.
He doesn't mention fonts (Score:5, Informative)
The current versions of all the major browsers can now dynamically download fonts. We can finally stop putting display text in images. Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox (3.6 or greater) and IE are all on board with this. By IE 9, they'll even be using the same font format, Web Open Font Format. (Except for the iPad, which, for some weird reason, currently requires fonts in SVG format. But even the iPad understands "@font-face")
Few sites are using this capability yet. We are, as a demo. Try our steampunk search engine [sitetruth.com] with authentic Victorian fonts.
Re:The one real data model: XML (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I love flashblock (Score:2, Informative)
Remember even 2010's IE8 has no HTML5, and IE9 won't support it well.
You should probably go look at MS's IE9 demo materials before you go making statements like this.
Re:HTML5 Will Help Change The Web (Score:2, Informative)
It will take off but you need software to fill in what was assumed users would do.
OpenCalais (http://www.opencalais.com/) does most of that already.
Re:The one real data model: XML (Score:5, Informative)
HTML can be loaded incrementally, XHTML can't, as you can only validate the document when you have all of it.
You don't need to validate an XHTML document in order to start rendering it.