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What To Expect From HTML5 272

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes a deeper look at HTML5, outlining what developers should expect from this overhaul of HTML — one that some believe could put an end to proprietary Web technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. Among the most eagerly anticipated additions to HTML5 are new elements and APIs that allow content authors to create rich media using nothing more than standards-based HTML. The standard also introduces browser-based application caches, which enable Web apps to store information on the client device. 'But for all of HTML5's new features, users shouldn't expect plug-ins to disappear overnight. The Web has a long history of many competing technologies and media formats, and the inertia of that legacy will be difficult to overcome. It may yet be many years before a pure-HTML5 browser will be able to match the capabilities of today's patchwork clients,' McAllister writes. 'In the end, browser market share may be the most significant hurdle for developers interested in making the most of HTML5. Until these legacy browsers are replaced with modern updates, Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites: a rich version for HTML5-enabled users, and a version for legacy browsers that falls back on outdated rendering tricks.'"
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What To Expect From HTML5

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  • Thank you Apple (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:33PM (#31402464)
    Big thanks to Apple for standing up to the Flash juggernaut and showing the world we could live without it, thereby paving the way for HTML 5.
    • Vector animation? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:46PM (#31402646) Homepage Journal
      In order that HTML 5 may replace Flash on Newgrounds.com, what tool for creating vector animations for HTML 5 is comparable to Adobe Flash CS series?
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        In order that HTML 5 may replace Flash on Newgrounds.com, what tool for creating vector animations for HTML 5 is comparable to Adobe Flash CS series?

        You might try Adobe Illustrator paired with Ikivo Animator, that's what Adobe recommends anyway.

      • Re:Vector animation? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:58PM (#31402800)

        no, no, no, you're getting this all wrong - this isn't about what people want or what actually happens in the real world!

        it's about a type of consumer so brainwashed they actually believe that apple are a real force for good, and that anything that stands in the way of their favorite company's marketing machine is sheer anathema.

        oh and not forgetting the stunted ideologue who will sing the praises of html5, knowing full well it won't amount to squat. who could forget them around here!

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
          I feel old now, remembering back to when VRML was the new standard that was going to sweep the web--but didn't amount to squat.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:46PM (#31402658)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        I wouldn't say learning is the problem, not wanting to buy or pirate Adobe products is the issue.

        • by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @02:34PM (#31404056) Journal

          Not wanting to buy / pirate is a symptom of a larger issue with professional computer users in general. There are those who are willing to pay for tools that will get the job done, and there are those who won't. Those are willing to do so, do so. Those who aren't will constantly seek alternatives and seemingly never learn the adage that, "You get what you pay for."

          Some people don't seem to understand that the largest incentive to introduce new technologies is to make money. There is money to be made in making people's lives easier, or allowing people to accomplish tasks. Adobe has Flash. Microsoft has Windows. Neither of them are necessarily the "best" way of doing things. None the less they get the job done to a certain extent.

          In the context of HTML5, people are going to have to recreate Flash like functionality. The first few attempts will probably suck or be "feature incomplete". What is the financial incentive to reproduce Flash like functionality in HTML5? In the long term people can save money by not having to use Adobe Flash. In the near to short term, what is the benefit? Who is going to come up with the Flash killer out of the goodness and kindness of their heart?

      • by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @02:33PM (#31404036)
        Man, let me tell you, as a linux user I really miss the pre flash video days. It's so annoying facing a somewhat heavy processor load while watching videos online, compared to not being able to see them at all. To getting codec errors, and redirects because the browser detection was windows-centric or because they actually booted people away that were using linux. Glad to see those wonderful days might be making a comeback!
    • Re:Thank you Apple (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:48PM (#31402678) Homepage Journal

      Well I think it has less to do with Apple standing up than it does with the fact that Flash didn't scale to mobile devices well.
      Before the iPhone mobile friendly sites where few and far between. Once the iPhone started selling great guns more and more people moved to have their sites be mobile friendly.

      Of course Apple isn't going to support Thedora so with that desision they are pushing HTML5 to be more proprietary than it could have been.
      Of course Apple's choice is probably motivated by the fact that they already have hardware support for h.264 in their devices.

    • Re:Thank you Apple (Score:5, Informative)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:56PM (#31402778)

      Big thanks to Apple for standing up to the Flash juggernaut and showing the world we could live without it, thereby paving the way for HTML 5.

      And big thanks to Google for creating a non-Flash dependent version of YouTube to help Apple do it, and starting to move YouTube away from Flash in general.

    • Let's not kid ourselves. Apple isn't trying to pull people away from Flash because they're big-hearted. They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.

      If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public

      • My guess as to why Apple doesn't support Ogg Theora in Safari is because their mobile devices already have hardware support for H.264. So on Apple's mobile hardware, H.264 video would drastically outperform Ogg.

      • by Lunix Nutcase ( 1092239 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:44PM (#31403406)

        They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.

        This is so wrong it's not even funny. MPEG LA doesn't own the H.264 patents. MPEG LA is a firm that licenses the patent pool to H.264 and numerous other technologies.

        If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.

        Since Apple owns patents to H.264 I doubt you are going to see them doing either.

        In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?

        Why are you surprised by this? Apple is a patent holder to H.264. Why would they want to support a video codec that is a rival to a technology in which they hold patents?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Sancho ( 17056 )

        No one said that Apple was big-hearted. But let's face it. Flash is a steaming pile. Very recently, it's been implicated as the cause of most OS X crashes, as well as as the best vector of attack for web malware. It's installed on almost every computer that surfs the web. It's a huge resource hog, and incidentally, most flash video players are just streaming down h.264.

        Now last I'd heard, Microsoft had no intention of supporting video tags in IE. Firefox can't support h.264 (though a plugin could.) B

      • They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.

        How is Apple going to be the gateway for all H264 content?

        If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.

        Well I don't think they have control of the H264 patents, so I'm not sure they can do much to force it into the public domain. As for Ogg Theora, it's necessary to ask the question, why didn't Apple use it as their format of choice? There may be various kinds of reasons.

        In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?

        Well I'm not sure what you mean by "by deliberate choice". Apple doesn't include a codec for Ogg in Quicktime by default, but you can download the codec from Xiph and install it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Now let's be fair here - Theora isn't that good. It's XviD-standard, so it's, well, it's okay, but in terms of a drop-in replacement for H.264 for Youtube it does not cut the mustard.

        And Nokia has asserted it has submarine patents on it, and hasn't actually promised not to enforce them (we'd bitterly hate it if it did, given the involvement it's had in things like Maemo and QT, but still). Given that, and that Apple and Nokia are now competitors, Apple do not want to risk Theora. That's the reason why.

        Meanw

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tim C ( 15259 )

      You mean, big thanks to Apple for preventing anything capable of interpreting arbitrary scripts to be installed or run on the iPhone so they can ensure that any apps (and especially games) used on the device came from their app store.

      Don't get me wrong I don't condemn them for it, but they are most certainly not doing it to be altruistic, or for the good of the Internet as a whole.

  • What to except (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You can expect inconsistent implementations; same as it ever was.

    • by Nadaka ( 224565 )

      right.

      HTML 5 is a half-ass hacked attempt to fix the web without breaking backwards compatibility. XHTML 2 was a better specification going forwards, one of the big reasons for that was the specification requires a consistent DOM model.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by BZ ( 40346 )

        I think you underestimate the "without breaking backwards compatibility" part of this.

        XHTML2 was pretty much designed to not work with any existing web infrastructure (either existing content or existing browsers). If you think a parallel web built from the ground up is the way to go, feel free to work on it, but the network effects involved make it a pretty risky prospect.

      • Re:What to except (Score:4, Interesting)

        by game kid ( 805301 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:17PM (#31403016) Homepage

        fix the web without breaking backwards compatibility

        Using video when object with just a mime type and filename doesn't break backwards compatibility?

        Given that intentional spite of IE (video is otherwise redundant and has not brought about a standard format), along with canvas and the codification of bad SGML parsing, I'm not convinced we should celebrate HTML5's failure (or FAIL, as people who can't type lowercase seven-letter words say now). I won't touch it.

        I'll keep using XHTML 1.0 and pretend HTML5 and XHTML 1.1 (with its invalid DTDs and such) never existed, tyvm.

  • HTML5 (Score:2, Interesting)

    I won't touch it until Ian Hickson either gets his head out from his orifice or he steps down as the lead dev. I know some of what's going on (from list archives and discussions with at least one of the main devs on the HTML5 WG list) and he's doing his best to kill HTML 5 and standards based design completely.

    • Re:HTML5 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:19PM (#31403048)

      I agree that Hickson is more of a bane than a boon, but he's not trying to kill all of standards based design, he's just trying to kill the best parts of it. Developers do want XML compliance. If they would just drop the HTML5 tag soup and enforce XHTML5, I would have much less against this mess.

      That, and I still believe Chris Wilson is Microsoft's trojan horse.

      • by Ant P. ( 974313 )

        If they would just drop the HTML5 tag soup and enforce XHTML5, I would have much less against this mess.

        There's already a language designed to do what you want - it's called XHTML2.

        Have fun convincing browsers to implement an XML-only syntax incompatible with the other 99.999999% of the web and let us know how it goes.

  • If well the article touches a bit some support of it on current browsers (i.e. in webkit enabled ones) would be interesting to know what portion of it is more globally supported right now in current desktop/mobile browsers, and of course, which ones. If Youtube decided to kill IE6, the move of sites to HTML5 could help to kill some other outdated and potentially dangerous other browsers, at least is the latest version of the main ones share a common ground on HTML5.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:44PM (#31402632)

    Getting mentioned next to Flash in all of these "End of..." articles.

  • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:48PM (#31402686)

    I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.

      I agree. I don't understand all the high-fiving going on. So HTML5 can play video. And? The rest of Flash's functionality?

    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:02PM (#31402842) Journal
      While the situation RE: Software patents isn't really where Free software enthusiasts would like it(among others, it isn't hard to find people who think that software patents are a serious clusterfuck); there is big difference:

      If something is done in flash, it is almost definitely done using a proprietary codec(either one of Adobe's weirdo legacy proprietary codecs, or h264), wrapped in Flash, a proprietary runtime for which no good-enough-to-be-particularly-useful implementations exist. If something is done with an HTML 5 video tag, it will(outside of nests of Free software idealists) almost certainly be h264. However, while the patent situation is a mess, good Free implementations of h264 exist, and Free browsers will be on the leading edge of HTML5 development.

      With flash based stuff, it is essentially impossible to function on a Free stack, no matter where you live, what patent licences you either posses or are willing to ignore, or whatever. It just isn't possible. Gnash is Not There Yet, and even if you are willing to go proprietary, Flash pretty much sucks on anything that isn't 32-bit windows, and it's a pit of resource consumption and security flaws even there. Silverlight is incrementally better, with Moonlight covering a greater subset of Silverlight than Gnash does Flash, and it not sucking architecturally as much; but it still doesn't cover enough(and pretty much any Silverlight based media application will be using a patent encumbered codec and/or DRM in any event).

      h264/HTML5 still suffers patent encumbrance; but anybody not subject to, or willing to ignore, those patents can have a very functional Free implementation more or less now. That counts for something.
      • good Free implementations of h264 exist

        If you're referring to ffmpeg, it's infringing on several patents held by MPEG-LA [ffmpeg.org]

        whether you are safe or not depends on where you live and how judges interpret the law in your jurisdiction.

        Theora? Don't hold your breath [lwn.net]. Apple, (one of the members of the MPEG-LA patent pool) won't use it no matter what.

        • If you're referring to ffmpeg, it's infringing on several patents held by MPEG-LA

          There exists one workaround for MPEG-LA patents:

          1. Emigrate from the United States and other countries where MPEG-LA controlled patents are enforceable.
          2. Start a web site operated from and hosted in this country.
          3. Use IP address geotargeting to make your web site available in markets other than the United States and other countries where MPEG-LA controlled patents are enforceable. For markets with patent restrictions, display "Coming Soon" with a JavaScript countdown showing the number of seconds until the essen
      • If something is done in flash, it is almost definitely done using a proprietary codec(either one of Adobe's weirdo legacy proprietary codecs, or h264)

        For the record, Adobe's "weirdo legacy proprietary codec" was basically h263.

        Not that I disagree with your post in general. Just letting you know.

      • by Draek ( 916851 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @03:18PM (#31404698)

        If something is done with an HTML 5 video tag, it will(outside of nests of Free software idealists) almost certainly be h264.

        You think? just like people only posted MPEG2 videos back in the days before Flash? no, what will happen is that everything will almost certainly be h.264, until there's a better codec out there (let's call it h.265) at which point half the content will be in h.264 and half in h.265, then large companies will smell the blood and jump in with their own, improved formats (let's call them WMV2) and lobby large content providers to use it, until browser makers start seeing h.264 as 'legacy' by being so incredibly inefficient compared to h.265 and WMV2 and drop support for it (it's not specified in the standard, remember?) and before you know it, we're in the exact same situation we had before Flash and all you've gained is that the propietary crap is wrapped in a 'video' tag rather than an 'object' one, for all the good that does to you.

        No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire. That was what was going to happen with Theora as the baseline but devs able to specify h.264 or whatever shiny toy came later, until Apple began to pout and cry and refuse to implement Theora no matter what, leading us to the current situation.

    • by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:04PM (#31402868)

      I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.

      Picture this, in 5 years you're developing new Web site and you want a Web application on that site. Say it's a little Web based game. Will you:

      • Create a version in Flash and not support the iPhone, iPad, and several other phones.
      • Create a version in Flash and a version in HTML5 to support both regular Web browsers and the iPhone, iPad, and Mobile devices that don't do Flash?
      • Just create an HTML5 version without Flash, and still support both all major browsers and the iPhone, iPad, and other mobile browsers, excluding some very old versions of browsers that have not installed the Google Frame plug-in?

      Basically, for applications, Flash becomes redundant since you need to use HTM for other devices anyway and HTML 5 supports everything important Flash does. For video, Flash becomes useless overhead, since you can just specify a codec already used in Flash which will save the user's processor and using Flash limits your audience to a subset of what just specifying a standard codec or two does.

      • Just create an HTML5 version without Flash, and still support both all major browsers and the iPhone, iPad, and other mobile browsers, excluding some very old versions of browsers that have not installed the Google Frame plug-in?

        IE tends to be more popular at work or other locked-down environments, where Group Policy bans the installation of Chrome Frame. In a lot of cases, even the PC in the break room has only IE without Chrome Frame.

        for applications, Flash becomes redundant [...] For video, Flash becomes useless overhead

        I know of two ways to represent video: pixel block transforms and vector animations. Both H.264 and Theora are based on pixel block transforms. But a lot of the video on, say, Newgrounds is vector animations. So what do you recommend to replace SWF for that?

    • Also there is no real guarantee that HTML5 will be better then Flash, Silverlight either. Yes complain how much Flash Sucks. However we open a door for a lot of bad implementations of HTML5

    • Well "put an end to Flash" for what? AFAIK HTML5 still can't replicated Flash games very well, so there will probably still be a use for Flash.

      However, most of what people use Flash and Silverlight for these days is watching movies. More and more, the videos are MPEG4 videos using H264 and AAC. People tend to use Flash and Silverlight as players, but really that's all they are-- media players. Flash is taking the place of VLC or Quicktime or WMP, decoding H264.

      The reason people have used Flash for thi

  • my bitter ways (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bigmaddog ( 184845 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:53PM (#31402732)
    I'm at the point in my web developing days where I don't really care what's in the standard, so long as it is unambiguous and everyone adheres to it. I am doomed to be eternally disappointed.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 )
      In all my years of programming, I have yet to see a completely clear, unambiguous standard. They don't exist, since English does a poor job at concise specification of behavior. That is why smart people participate in interoperability tests for new protocols to reconcile the different interpretations of different developers. Example: many years ago, ACC LAN center developed an XNS implementation that worked perfectly talking to other copies of itself, but failed miserably with other vendors' implementations
      • With the importance of the web, I don't really understand why the W3C does not have a disambiguation committee that chooses and confirms which of the diverging implementations should be used. Sounds like a very wise investment of 2-3 people's wages.

  • InfoWorld SUCKS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by e2d2 ( 115622 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:53PM (#31402740)

    And here is what to expect from an InfoWorld article - very little substance littered over at least 5 pages soaked with advertisements.

  • Any one have an idea if the security risk are any higher using HTML5? Or will it be the same risk just different types of vulnerabilities?

    • by BZ ( 40346 )

      Different types of vulnerabilities are likely, yes. Some security risks will become smaller (e.g. no more disagreement between browser and plug-in as to what the security context of a given piece of script is, due to there being only one piece of code enforcing security policy).

      But more importantly, there won't be a monoculture of vulnerabilities (modulo vulnerabilities required by the spec and not caught in review), and vulnerability patching would happen when browsers patch their stuff and push the secur

    • Any one have an idea if the security risk are any higher using HTML5? Or will it be the same risk just different types of vulnerabilities?

      It's something of a trade off, but long term an improvement. You see, either way you can disable the plugin or disable javascript for a site to prevent exploits. With Javascript and HTML5 though, you can pick any browser to use and there is ongoing competition for making the best one. For Flash and Silverlight, you're stuck with a single vendor providing it, so any vulnerability and you're stuck waiting for Adobe and MS respectively. You can compare it to e-mail, perhaps. What is more secure Outlook, or sta

    • This is a perfectly valid question and a point I don't see raised very often, and something I immediately think of when I hear the word 'overhaul'. Why is this marked troll?
    • On the one hand a lot of functionality is moved rather hastily from dedicated, years old plugins into the browser itself, which opens the door for bugs, incorrect implementations and general fuck-ups. So in the first few browser iterations there certainly is a risk that someone, somewhere, has missed something critical. Though, as with all other bugs, this should be ironed out over time. The foundation for most of the vulnerable parts, JavaScript, has been around for quite some time now; the worst attack ve

  • By far the most useful feature for web developers. Data validation with JavaScript off via new input types, available now in Opera. So sad they didn't mention that in the article.
  • It would go great with a compressed standard for transport stream, such as what Opera does with its mobile for Turbo speeds.

    Standard encryption would also be appreciated.

    • by molo ( 94384 )

      What, never heard of deflate encoding? mod_gzip.

      -molo

      • by Ant P. ( 974313 )

        He's probably referring to the fact HTTP headers are around half a KB per request and never compressed.

    • It would go great with a compressed standard for transport stream

      It already has one for at least document bodies (Accept-Encoding: gzip), even if not for the HTTP headers.

  • Neil McAllister takes a deeper look at HTML5, outlining what developers should expect from this overhaul of HTML -- one that some believe could put an end to proprietary Web technologies such as Flash and Silverlight.

    Good luck on getting Microsoft to sign off on that for IE. They are unlikly to incorporate a standard that eliminates one or more of their "technologies".

  • by Anonymous Coward

    While I'm glad to see movement towards non-prop web video playback, how else (besides Flash/Silverlight) can you do online interactive seminars/meetings with shared audio/video between multiple users (let alone screen/application sharing)? While the HTML5 spec seems to cover video playback pretty well, I don't see an standard-based specification for sharing in streamed audio/video between multiple users (but maybe I'm overlooking something?).

    And no this isn't about "chat roulette", it's about remote meetin

  • Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites How is that any worse than what we have now, where developers are stuck maintaining a version of their site for IE, another for Netscape/Mozilla, and ignoring the fact that their site doesn't work on most other (e.g. mobile) browsers? At least a viable HTML 5 standard holds out the hope of eventually needing only a single version of each website. Google "browser detection" if you don't think supporting multiple browsers is already a problem
    • I've never heard of anyone mantaining a version of their site for IE and another for Mozilla Firefox. At most we have IE-specific CSS or Javascript code to work around certain bugs of IE6 and IE7... but that's hardly worth of being called "another version" of the site... more like a patch.

      For a site of more than minimum complexity you need a solid code base... and having two different versions of the site goes completely against that purpose. That's why, for any development worth its salt, I don't expect we

  • by McBeer ( 714119 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:18PM (#31403038) Homepage
    Honestly I'm not rooting for html 5 to replace flash/Silverlight for RIA. I don't like having to have 5 times as many tests in my matrix (one for each browser). I don't like having to write ajax shims whenever I want to use the db from the client. I don't like how hard it is to make reusable html controls that can't break other parts of the site. I don't like how javascript scales up for larger projects... the list goes on. I'm welcome some improvements to html+javascript and for using it to display documents. That said, It simply isn't designed for RIA. Flash/Silverlight are.
    • Well, if you just design if for IE you'll take care of about half your customers, demographics depending. Half is better than nothing!
  • At the last meet of Providence Geeks I heard quite a bit about HTML5. But I have yet to find a decent how-to for it, nor a decent list of tags, etc. available. It's just a horrible mish-mash right now. And FTA, 21 years for full deployment. I said 5 years.
  • . . . because there are so many to choose!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    doesn't that make Flash a great HTML 5 editor?

  • Until these legacy browsers are replaced with modern updates, Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites: a rich version for HTML5-enabled users, and a version for legacy browsers that falls back on outdated rendering tricks.

    I've never worked for a company that gave me the time to do two versions of a site. The upshot is you always wind up with the lowest common denominator. Thus, no HTML5-based sites. :(

    Unless you're willing to trust some javascript-based solution that enables HTML

  • It's hard to get too excited about new web stuff because as a web developer, the answer to "when can I start using the new stuff in my sites" is always "when 90%+ of my visitors have browsers that support it."

    And given the excruciatingly slow rates of: IE losing market share, MS implementing new technologies in IE, and users upgrading to newer versions of IE; the answer to that 90%+ question for HTML5 will be measured in years from now.

  • by CodeBuster ( 516420 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @02:55PM (#31404348)
    Probably not much until IE supports it...
  • html5-block add-on? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fractal Dice ( 696349 ) on Monday March 08, 2010 @04:35PM (#31405712) Journal
    Given that a flash-blocking addon is pretty much a requirement to make the web readable these days, does this fancy html5 come with an expectation that browsers will give client-users more power to control what craziness sites are allowed to access with all these more intrusive "features"?

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