Lucid Digital Media

Recently the big standard to follow in the world of web development has been XHTML.  You simply weren't anyone in the web development world in the last couple of years if you didn't have a solid grasp of how to build XHTML standards compliant web pages.  So with that in mind, whats all this talk of HTML5.

If you were to look solely at the name and nothing else, you'd be forgiven for thinking that HTML5 is just a refresh of the long defunct HTML4 standard.  You couldn't be more wrong however.  HTML5 takes a long and hard look at the sorts of things that web developers have to do on a regular basis these days and implements features which should make many currently tricky tasks fairly trivial.

The focus of HTML5 is on the development of web applications, not just web pages.  For that reason, news tags have been added and new API's and interfaces which turn defaco features into standard documented features.  They've also added essential new features as standard like video playback, offline storage API's and Drag and Drop.

With these new features it should be much easier to build Rich Internet Applications using only in-browser technologies and avoiding the use of 3rd party plugins like Flash and Silverlight.  To that end, youTube have already build a demo version of their site which uses the HTML5 technologies in the new beta version of Firefox to implement a Flash-less site complete with video playback.

So whats the catch... Well its somewhat clear that for these standards to be effective they have to be implemented in the browsers that most people are using.  At the moment, most people are using Internet Explorer, and unfortunately Microsoft has shown itself less than willing/capable to implement new standards in a timely or accurate way.  Microsoft itself has recently said that it sees mainstream adoption of HTML5 to be at least 10 years out, even when faced with versions of Firefox  and Safari which already implement parts of the specification.  IE8 itself does not even begin to implement older standards like CSS3, where their competitors have almost complete support.

So before HTML5 can become the web developers panacea that we all hope its going to be, we're going to have to wait for Microsoft to catch up and add support, and that might take a fair while!