In-Depth Look At HTML5

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used.

They can accept it all day long and want to distribute software that will encode and decode h.264, but where do you expect for them to get the money for the per-copy royalties from? Of course, being unwilling to push software that is inherently un-free is acting like a little kid.

Re:The truth is

[pipatron]

How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[WiglyWorm]

You are thinking of title text. Alt text is intended for accessibility for screen readers and other non-image capable browsers. It is not a caption, it is an alternate .

HTML5 figure and figcaption tags, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp [w3schools.com]

And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp [w3schools.com]

Re:The truth is

[PhunkySchtuff]

H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016.
You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.

Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf [mpegla.com]