HTML5 promises to revolutionize the way you build web sites. Check out what fantastic new features are in store in the forthcoming Web standard.
What a difference a decade makes. Or rather twelve years, when the last official version of HTML, HTML 4.0, became the official standard for web document markup. The 12 years since then has seen incredible changes in not only how we build web sites, but also how the world uses the Web. The folks affiliated with the W3C have been hard at work for some time updating the markup standard, with the release of HTML5 estimated to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage in 2012. Yet despite not being officially complete, browser vendors are already adding HTML5 support, meaning you can start exploring its new features right now!
In many ways, HTML5 is an attempt to bring order to many of the features and behaviors that have become the norm in recent years. This section highlights some of the more compelling additions.
With plugins such as Flash, Silverlight, and various codecs causing considerable grief over the years, HTML5 seeks to standardize the audio and video access process by including new <audio> and <video> tags, respectively. Of course, the mere addition of such tags won’t remove the need for the client to somehow load the media resource. So, vendors are still working out exactly which formats will be supported, although currently MP3, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis are leading the pack. Further, you can determine whether a particular MIME type is supported on the client with HTML5, and offer alternative formats to those browsers that necessarily support the default choice.
With CSS and DIV/SPAN so commonly used to define page elements such as a header and footer, it’s almost as if tags such as <div id="header"></div> have become part of the HTML lexicon. The W3C seems to agree, having added <header></header> and <footer></footer> tags to the specification.
Several other new tags have been incorporated into HTML5, including meter (representing scalar measurements), time (dates and times), address (e-mail addresses, postal addresses, etc.), and more.
Web-based solutions such as Google Apps have done a great job in terms of bringing client-side applications to the browser. However, these sorts of applications logically must be constantly connected to the Internet, as all of the information is stored in the cloud. HTML5 will allow disconnected clients to continue using these applications by introducing a new feature known as Local Storage, which will store data offline until a connection is resumed. Although the browser vendors still have to decide exactly how much information a web site will be able to store on the client, the specification draft currently recommends a 5MB limit.
Why should the server side have all the fun? HTML5 will also support a new feature known as Web SQL, which will allow for SQL queries to be embedded directly alongside HTML. The matter of specifically which databases will be supported — not to mention the proposed solution in its entirety — has been a subject of much contention. Firefox currently supports a SQLite-driven solution, but as of late it seems that Mozilla, Microsoft, and other vendors are putting their weight behind an alternative solution known as WebSimpleDB.
If I were to one day stumble upon the proverbial genie in a bottle, my three wishes couldn’t be more obvious:
The so-called Browser Wars have indeed been bloody, with the primary victims being the developers who create web sites and the users who’ve chosen to use Internet Explorer to navigate them. Yet with Microsoft’s flagship browser still managing to dominate the market, it’s clear that HTML5′s success will hinge in large part on how committed the software giant is to supporting the new standard in future browser releases.
In a move sure to send developers around the globe into the streets in a geeky reenactment of VE Day, Microsoft is emerging as an enthusiastic HTML5 adopter, announcing Internet Explorer 9′s considerable HTML5 capabilities during the March MIX conference. If you’re running Windows Vista or 7, a preview version of IE9 is available for download at the IE Test Center. You can also check out a few impressive HTML5-specific demos on the IE site, several of which work quite well on my Ubuntu 9.10 laptop running Firefox 3.5.
Joining Microsoft as active participants within the HTML Working Group and earnest supporters of HTML5 in their respective browsers are Apple, Google and Opera. Online destinations such as YouTube are also planning for the future, currently offering experimental support for an HTML5-based video player. Joining the beta program will result in the new player being used for any videos you watch via the site instead of the standard Flash player, allowing you to test the feature and offer the YouTube team valuable feedback. Learn more about this experimental program here.
Developers around the Web are already hard at work putting together pretty impressive learning resources that cover various facets of the forthcoming standard. In this section I highlighted a few of my favorites.
HTML5′s impact on how we develop web sites will no doubt be significant, particularly given the most cohesive vendor support for an HTML standard that we’ve seen in the past 15 years. Although the standard isn’t yet official, there’s no time like the present to begin exploring its many features and at least thinking about how you can use it to wow your audience!
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