What To Expect From HTML5

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes a deeper look at HTML5, outlining what developers should expect from this overhaul of HTML — one that some believe could put an end to proprietary Web technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. Among the most eagerly anticipated additions to HTML5 are new elements and APIs that allow content authors to create rich media using nothing more than standards-based HTML. The standard also introduces browser-based application caches, which enable Web apps to store information on the client device. 'But for all of HTML5's new features, users shouldn't expect plug-ins to disappear overnight. The Web has a long history of many competing technologies and media formats, and the inertia of that legacy will be difficult to overcome. It may yet be many years before a pure-HTML5 browser will be able to match the capabilities of today's patchwork clients,' McAllister writes. 'In the end, browser market share may be the most significant hurdle for developers interested in making the most of HTML5. Until these legacy browsers are replaced with modern updates, Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites: a rich version for HTML5-enabled users, and a version for legacy browsers that falls back on outdated rendering tricks.'"

Comments

What to except

[Anonymous Coward]

You can expect inconsistent implementations; same as it ever was.

Vector animation?

[tepples]

In order that HTML 5 may replace Flash on Newgrounds.com, what tool for creating vector animations for HTML 5 is comparable to Adobe Flash CS series?

Re:Vector animation?

[tepples]

From this page:

Thank you for your interest in the Ikivo Animator. Please contact Ikivo sales [mailto] for assistance in purchasing the Ikivo Animator.

I've seen these before, and "please e-mail sales" in lieu of a base price usually turns out to be code-word for "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

Re:Thank you Apple

[LWATCDR]

Well I think it has less to do with Apple standing up than it does with the fact that Flash didn't scale to mobile devices well.
Before the iPhone mobile friendly sites where few and far between. Once the iPhone started selling great guns more and more people moved to have their sites be mobile friendly.

Of course Apple isn't going to support Thedora so with that desision they are pushing HTML5 to be more proprietary than it could have been.
Of course Apple's choice is probably motivated by the fact that they already have hardware support for h.264 in their devices.

End of Proprietary Formats?

[StormReaver]

I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.

Re:End of Proprietary Formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.

I agree. I don't understand all the high-fiving going on. So HTML5 can play video. And? The rest of Flash's functionality?

Re:End of Proprietary Formats?

[tepples]

And? The rest of Flash's functionality?

The rest of SWF's functionality is supposed to be in JavaScript and the HTML5 DOM, including the canvas and audio elements.

Re:End of Proprietary Formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, HTML5 will not stop the use of flash. Sites like Hulu use flash's RTMP, which make ripping their content difficult. The HTML5 version of youtube places div layer over the video making it so the user cannot simply right click and do a save as. However using the 'inspect element' option of Chrome one can simply change the class of this div from 'video-blocker' to an empty string, make the div blocking technique very moot, even for the non techie. Even youtube hasn't made some the more 'commercial' content available in an HTML5 version. Flash as seen as a way of protecting content, and as such, commercial content will remain using flash.

Re:End of Proprietary Formats?

[Draek]

If something is done with an HTML 5 video tag, it will(outside of nests of Free software idealists) almost certainly be h264.

You think? just like people only posted MPEG2 videos back in the days before Flash? no, what will happen is that everything will almost certainly be h.264, until there's a better codec out there (let's call it h.265) at which point half the content will be in h.264 and half in h.265, then large companies will smell the blood and jump in with their own, improved formats (let's call them WMV2) and lobby large content providers to use it, until browser makers start seeing h.264 as 'legacy' by being so incredibly inefficient compared to h.265 and WMV2 and drop support for it (it's not specified in the standard, remember?) and before you know it, we're in the exact same situation we had before Flash and all you've gained is that the propietary crap is wrapped in a 'video' tag rather than an 'object' one, for all the good that does to you.

No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire. That was what was going to happen with Theora as the baseline but devs able to specify h.264 or whatever shiny toy came later, until Apple began to pout and cry and refuse to implement Theora no matter what, leading us to the current situation.

my bitter ways

[bigmaddog]

I'm at the point in my web developing days where I don't really care what's in the standard, so long as it is unambiguous and everyone adheres to it. I am doomed to be eternally disappointed.

Re:my bitter ways

[Locke2005]

In all my years of programming, I have yet to see a completely clear, unambiguous standard. They don't exist, since English does a poor job at concise specification of behavior. That is why smart people participate in interoperability tests for new protocols to reconcile the different interpretations of different developers. Example: many years ago, ACC LAN center developed an XNS implementation that worked perfectly talking to other copies of itself, but failed miserably with other vendors' implementations. Why? Because the C standard at the time didn't specify the order of allocation of bitfields, and the developer had assumed LSB first allocation when instead it was doing MSB first.

InfoWorld SUCKS

[e2d2]

And here is what to expect from an InfoWorld article - very little substance littered over at least 5 pages soaked with advertisements.

What are the security risk?

[koan]

Any one have an idea if the security risk are any higher using HTML5? Or will it be the same risk just different types of vulnerabilities?

Re:Inertia be damned

[NoSleepDemon]

You do realise that video wasn't the only thing Flash did, right? What exactly in HTML5 is going to replace the ease with which you can create animations and games with a unique look and feel in Flash?

...Now help standardize on non-proprietary codecs.

[KingSkippus]

Let's not kid ourselves. Apple isn't trying to pull people away from Flash because they're big-hearted. They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.

If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.

In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora? I mean, I can understand them implementing H.264, if they think it's a better codec. Google does too, and they've said on record that they think that H.264 is superior. Nevertheless, Chrome does also support Ogg Theora. Opera supports Ogg Theora. Firefox, of course supports Ogg Theora, and due to its open source nature, can't support H.264 unless it's released to the public domain. Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.

So yeah, no thanks, Apple. At least, not yet.

Re:Thank you Apple

[Lunix Nutcase]

Why would they choose to support a codec that is a rival (theora) to one in which they hold patents (H.264)?

Old

[Anonymous Coward]

This is OLD news. I've been using "<!DOCTYPE html>" on all new sites at least the last year now, and any web developers who aren't investigating and/or anticipating HTML5 now that it is being implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, (IE9? not sure) are really just paving the way for their successors. With Gears, Google has shown off a bunch of these new features (most interestingly IMO the script-accessible local data store) and now that they're taking Gears off the market (not that it had a sizable market to speak of), I think it's a sign we should all begin to make use of the new stuff (still with graceful fallback, of course).

I'm not expecting anything from HTML5, because it has already lived up to my expectations.

Re:...Now help standardize on non-proprietary code

[Lunix Nutcase]

They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.

This is so wrong it's not even funny. MPEG LA doesn't own the H.264 patents. MPEG LA is a firm that licenses the patent pool to H.264 and numerous other technologies.

If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.

Since Apple owns patents to H.264 I doubt you are going to see them doing either.

In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?

Why are you surprised by this? Apple is a patent holder to H.264. Why would they want to support a video codec that is a rival to a technology in which they hold patents?

Re:...Now help standardize on non-proprietary code

[Sancho]

No one said that Apple was big-hearted. But let's face it. Flash is a steaming pile. Very recently, it's been implicated as the cause of most OS X crashes, as well as as the best vector of attack for web malware. It's installed on almost every computer that surfs the web. It's a huge resource hog, and incidentally, most flash video players are just streaming down h.264.

Now last I'd heard, Microsoft had no intention of supporting video tags in IE. Firefox can't support h.264 (though a plugin could.) But Safari does. So it is certainly clear that Apple is the big winner here, and any fighting that they are doing is certainly in their own interests. But it may still help out people interested in using other browsers eventually.

In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?

Safari, by deliberate choice, also does not support Vi keystrokes. Nor do they support, by deliberate choice, reading the contents of your flash drive directly from the browser.

Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.

Doublethink alert. Microsoft could support both, and has chosen not to. Windows 7 ships with h.264. Apple/Safari is not the odd man out. What's happened is that the fringe players added support for a codec that no one uses, and the big guns realize how pointless that is and have decided not to.

Re:...Now help standardize on non-proprietary code

[Anonymous Coward]

Again someone assuming Ogg Theora is a better codec despite lots of intelligent arguments against it from a codec standpoint. YAY SLASHDOT!

Re:Thank you Apple

[Tim C]

You mean, big thanks to Apple for preventing anything capable of interpreting arbitrary scripts to be installed or run on the iPhone so they can ensure that any apps (and especially games) used on the device came from their app store.

Don't get me wrong I don't condemn them for it, but they are most certainly not doing it to be altruistic, or for the good of the Internet as a whole.

brittle HTML5 implementation

[Dr Herbert West]

Mod parent up! I'm not looking forward to years of brittle HTML5 implementation on every damn "browser of the week" when building apps and games. At least Flash (don't get me wrong, I don't like a lot of its closed implementation either) works the same in all platforms that it runs on-- I develop for kiosks and museum exhibits as well. Why does everyone think implementing an HTML5 standard will result in all the crazy different browsers using it in a standard way?

What to Expect from HTML5?

[CodeBuster]

Probably not much until IE supports it...

Re:Er... standing up? Really?

[Korin43]

The benefit is that it allows the Internet to be used the way it was meant to be: by everyone. No more "you're too poor to make Flash games". Seems like a significant benefit to me.