The BBC's Ian Hardy looks at why companies have been rushing to embrace HTML5 - and the innovative ways it is being used
It's hard to imagine now,
but original sites on the world wide web, written in HTML code or
hypertext mark-up language, were made up of little more than text.
Corporate web designers were well
aware that most of their customers had slow connections and would not
tolerate much of a wait.
Even a simple black and white image could irritate a user, as
it gradually appeared on the screen revealing itself one painful line
at a time.
That began to change as modem speeds gradually crept up and
content makers used more sophisticated methods to encode their
multimedia content.
Macromedia's Flash, now an Adobe product, made all the
difference when it arrived in the mid-nineties. Animations, video
sequences and graphics became more sophisticated.
But since its invention in the early 1990s HTML has not supported video natively.
That is why HTML5 is being received so enthusiastically by
businesses in particular. The latest version can perform all kinds of
dynamic tasks and visual tricks. The web is progressing faster now than
it has in a long time. Going native
Application developers, like Kevin Sweeney who works at Vimeo,
a video-sharing website based in New York, have already embraced the
new tools that are built in to HTML5.
It will take time before all systems are able to work with HTML5
"We've needed to rely on third parties like Adobe Flash or
QuickTime and had to embed this inside web pages. What HTML5 will do is
remove them from the equation so this stuff is supported natively," he
says.
Put simply it means that there's now much less chance that
customers visiting a website will come across a black hole in the middle
of the page, or get endless prompts to "download a plug-in" which may
take several minutes to install.
People will know what ingredients they have in their refrigerator and keep track of it using an HTML5 app on the screen”
Aaron GustafsonAuthor
By then it is often too late. The consumer has already clicked on a competitor's website.
The iPod Touch, iPhone and lately the iPad have been
especially good at leaving black holes on the screen, because the former
boss of Apple, Steve Jobs, would not allow Flash to run on any of his
iOS devices from the start.
The success of these products globally means many companies
cannot ignore the need to re-code their entire websites in HTML5,
especially the multimedia content.
A lot of companies are not waiting for the HTML5 specs to be
finalised and approved in a multi-year process. They have jumped right
in, using early "unofficial" versions of the code to deliver a complete
web page to every customer. New horizons
Aaron Gustafson, author of the book Adaptive Web Design, says
the versatility and dynamic nature of HTML5 means it can be used in new
ways in different environments including the office and kitchen.
"We are starting to see devices that are not traditionally web devices becoming more web-enabled," he says.
"If you are a recipe curator with a website, all of a sudden
you can build pages that work on a touchpad that's built into a
refrigerator. People will know what ingredients they have in their
refrigerator and keep track of it using an HTML5 app on the screen."
Many of Google's famous front page doodles, like this Jules Verne-inspired interactive submarine, are built using HTML5
Google is pushing HTML5 hard, not surprising since the greater
impact that web pages and apps have, the more advertising it can sell.
Its search homepage is traditionally sparse but many of the
doodles, including the Jules Verne-inspired interactive submarine, are
now being designed to take advantage of the newest code.
Jeff Harris, product manager for Google Docs, says HTML5 will change the way its services operate from the ground up.
"A simple example would be taking an attachment from your
desktop and dragging it into the compose window in Gmail. That's a basic
capability that you couldn't do five years ago because web browsers
didn't support it."
HTML5 also represents another step to the "semantic web", a
web structure championed by Tim Berners-Lee that cross-references,
reacts to and displays multiple information sources from the internet in
real time.
HTML5 is partly responsible for the browser wars in the past few years.
A decade ago Chrome, Firefox and Safari didn't exist, and browser updates for Internet Explorer were only occasional.
Today desktop and mobile browsers update frequently as new HTML5 functions get incorporated.
Companies favour HTML5 because it can also replicate
experiences previously only available inside an app, on the web. This is
especially true for the mobile environment.
And a lot of brand names don't like being part of someone
else's ecosystem because they lose control of pricing and subscribers.
The Financial Times recently announced it will shut off its iPad app
completely following the success of its HTML5 web page.
This is a trend that is likely to snowball within months. Flash forward
But where does this leave Adobe Flash?
Adobe's Danny Winokur insists Flash still has a future
The company has already stopped supporting it on mobile devices.
Danny Winokur, the general manager of the Interactive
Development Business at Adobe, says the future of Flash is not in doubt,
especially since protecting high quality assets with DRM (Digital
Rights Management) is not yet possible in HTML5.
"Flash is allowing things like 3D immersive gaming that you
would normally see on an Xbox or Playstation to come into a web
browser," he says.
"That's something that HTML may eventually be able to do but
it has a long way to go. Flash will pioneer those most advanced cases
like HD feature-rich cinema graphic content that needs to be
copy-protected."
Ideally of course the end user will not notice, or even care, that the web is being powered by a new updated set of code.
If HTML5 does its job properly, no-one outside the web development community will ever know about it!
Wiki
HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software.[1] It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997)[2] and, as of May 2012,
is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the
language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily
readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well.[2]
Following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5
is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use
on the World Wide Web are a mixture of features introduced by various
specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as
web browsers, those established by common practice, and the many syntax errors in existing web documents.[citation needed] It is also an attempt to define a single markup language
that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax. It includes
detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable
implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup
available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications.[3]
For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a potential candidate for
cross-platform mobile applications. Many features of HTML5 have been
built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices
such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm
Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1
billion in 2013.[4]
In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the new , and elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic
It will take time before all systems are able to work with HTML5
Many of Google's famous front page doodles, like this Jules Verne-inspired interactive submarine, are built using HTML5
Adobe's Danny Winokur insists Flash still has a future
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