HTML5 – are we ready for it?
Or more to the point….
is it ready for us?
A short history
The specification was started in June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0. First working draft was published on January 22, 2008 by the W3C group and it is expected to remain in development for many years, currently estimated at 2022! However many parts of the specification are stable and already utilised by some browsers with adoption growing daily. The tsunami has started.
5 cool things it can do
- create an interactive application experience rather than just a web page
– drag and drop
– built-in video support
– geolocation using the Geo Location API
– offline caching and storage
What it can´t do right now
- provide a consistent experience across browsers, very hit and miss
– support older browsers still in use…EVER!
– support all video codecs. There are two main players at the moment – Ogg Theora (open source but very inefficient) and h.264 (very efficient, but proprietary)
There is no doubt it will be adopted in a linear fashion before it is finalised as more and more parts of the specification become stable but how fast this will be is at this stage uncertain.
Go and see it for yourself in this amazing collaboration by Google and Arcade Fire, but be warned – it only works in Chrome or Safari
