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Maybe next time do a ten second Google search before you rant. You'll look better informed (and not foolish). Because, you see, They're part of the HTML5 spec and almost every current browser or platform supports them. But hey - boo Microsoft etc.

And as a follow-up, here's some good info on the Offline Manifest: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/t...

From the article:

Using the cache interface gives your application three advantages:

Offline browsing - users can navigate your full site when they're offline
Speed - resources come straight from disk, no trip to the network.
Resilience - if your site goes down for "maintenance" (as in, someone accidentally breaks everything), your users will get the offline experience

You can use an application manifest to avoid redownloading resources in web apps. If you use the "add to home screen" option on Android (and I assume other mobile OSes) then the web app will work offline (of course, only useful for apps that don't require Internet access).

So I just tried it in Chromium, and the cube is spinning. But then two problems come back. First, the contest requires that entries actually work in Firefox, and the best way I know of to ensure that I didn't use any WebKit- or Blink-specific features is to test in Firefox. Second, I can't see how player 2 would control his character. I plugged in a Logitech Dual Action, and the gamepad tester worked in Chrome but not in Firefox. I restarted Firefox, and all I got was "No gamepads seem to be connected. Be sure to plug in a gamepad and then press any of its buttons to activate it." Apparently I have to replace my distro-provided copy of Firefox 25.0.1 with a special build of an obsolete, vulnerable version (Firefox 17) to get game controllers to work.

There's some articles about the template tag, web components and custom elements. HTML5 Rocks has some articles on the shadow DOM as well.

there's also the latency issue, something no one thinks about when it comes to hype like this

That's actually exactly what Google was thinking about when they decided to check out WebSockets, which kills the standard HTTP overhead and keeps an existing connection open between client(s)/server.

In short yes:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/streaming/screenshare/

the Web only supports JavaScript [...] and the Java applet environment and MIDP phones only support Java

it is not common but for really complex applications Java (applets or Webstart) do run in your browser

Only in browsers that run on platforms to which the Java applet and Web Start environments are ported. The fastest growing platforms for web browsing (iOS and Android) notably do not support these environments as far as I can tell.

and kick the shit outta Javascript for functionality

A lot of Java APIs that interact with the local machine require applets to have been digitally signed with a code signing certificate. By the time analogous APIs were implemented in the HTML5 DOM for JS to use, developers found secure ways to sandbox them. One example is the File API. To read local files in a Java applet, for example, the developer needs to buy a code signing certificate and digitally sign the applet. To read local files in a web application running in a browser that supports the File API, an application is limited to those files that the user selected using the "open file" dialog or dragged in from the file manager, but no commercial certificate is needed.

performance

Java tends to have an annoying slow start-up time for the first applet that one runs in a particular browsing session, while the JVM reads the entire rt.jar from the disk. JS, on the other hand, is already loaded.

and cross-browser compatibility

Good luck getting a Java applet or a Java Web Start application to run on iOS, Android, Windows RT, or any other tablet operating system.

It depends on what they mean by "Web App", but it is, indeed, perfectly possible to produce an app in HTML5, for most HTML5 browsers, that's initially delivered by a web server that's 100% stored offline. Here's some information: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/offline

My suspicion though is that both the web app and the native app require an online connection, given the description.

Using HTML5's GetUserMedia()

It is coming, hold on to your butt.

Hardware API is also on its way too. It is so far working with controllers last I checked.
File API is, I don't know actually, I haven't checked it forever.

Media Capture

Then you are not paying attention to the HTML5 development. We're into the third generation of webcam API's, the first being over three years old now. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro/

Source maps fix this issue.

Try http://slides.html5rocks.com/ in IE9

Written for Chrome/WebKit, works in Gecko/FireFox, Presto/Opera but not in IE9 ...

This may be cutting edge but is still supported by all the major browser engines except IE9's .... So for 'conservative' should I read 'being left behind' ?

Google have said they will stop supporting older browsers, and have implied that a modern browser should support at least the core of HTML5 (including some features that IE9 still does not support...)

HTML4 was not a standard until May 2000, but was fully supported well before that even by IE ...

The downside is that there are no access to the local file system.

Ah, but you CAN:
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/

Google essentially already has their own "dive into" site. See HTML5 rocks.

Notifications are part of HTML5. As far as I know, only Chrome supports it at the moment, but it is being standardised.

So, it's a dumb-terminal that requires me to have constant access to the internet, can't store files, can't have actual programs installed on it.

Please catch up. It is not what you think.

It's not a dumb terminal, it doesn't require you to have constant access to the Internet (some apps require it, others don't), it can store data locally, and you can install programs. They're registered in the cloud, and if you log in and one is missing, it's quickly synchronized to the local device.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html
http://dev.w3.org/html5/webstorage/
http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/offline/storage/
http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/

Understanding the significance of ChromeOS requires that you abandon some old ways of thinking about how a computer should act. Yes, you're "losing" the desktop and the file folders. You're also losing slow boot times, viruses, the risk of losing your data in hard drive crashes or device theft, and the occasional maddening discovery that you left a critically important file on a hard drive at home|school|work.

This may not be the device for you, but it may be the device for a lot of people. It's worth pointing out that over half a million people buy smartphones every day that also walk away from a mountain of desktop-computer annoyances.

Whether it is "going away" is one thing (Answer: Not soon). Whether a developer must use it and a user must install it are all we really care about:

1. The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.

Doesn't mean I have to use it.

2. Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.

What animations can I do in Flash but not HTML5?

3. Adobe provides strong tools and support for designers and developers.

Okay, you got that one. I myself prefer not to use GUI tools but instead write by hand. So, it doesn't make me keep using Flash, but a less technical designer, sure.

4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.

This may come to HTML5 video. If it doesn't, many here may prefer it that way, on principle. Let a closed container hold the closed content.

5. Flash remains popular with online advertisers.

Great!

6. HTML 5 still has video codec patent issues to work out.

But even the article says that it appears those issues are getting worked out.

I also just read a very optimistic article on Google's html5rocks.com site about the video tag. You can do some things with the video tag that you can't in Flash, by the way.

Having various tabs open, I've seen thumbnail image sites where requesting a special image opens up a single large popup window for the entire site. All my tabs for the site send image updates to just the one popup, without opening other unecessary ones until I close it. Since most sites lack this discriminate control over how they open and control one a separate window, I'd say "yes." They probably do it by window title or something.

Submarine features are scary... HTML5 enables sites to save data to a mandatory browser-side DB (see "todo" lists, for example.) Though this has even more potential than cookies for misuse, Safari and Firefox currently auto-allow the feature and give you no control over it.