Slashdot Mirror
How HTML5 Will Change the Web
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond the codec and plug-in wars to examine nine areas where HTML5 will have a significant impact on Web development. From enabling more interactive graphics, to tapping local file storage, to geolocation, HTML5 is rife with rich capabilities — and may even improve our ability to secure applications delivered via the Web, Wayner writes. But the most important impact of HTML5 will be its ability to simplify Web development itself: 'HTML5 offers one language (JavaScript), one data model (XML and DOM), and one set of layout rules (CSS) to bind text, audio, video, and graphics. The challenge of making something beautiful is still immense, but it's simpler to work with a unified standard.'"
The link you really wanted where everything is on one page: http://www.infoworld.com/print/128080
HTML5 may offer a unified way to do things...but that does not mean that the other ways will just vanish. It will be a long time before HTML5 completely displaces Flash or Java applets, assuming that such a thing even happens. Frankly, I doubt that the popular browsers will even have a reliable implementation of the standard until at least 2013, so HTML5 won't really offer developers anything unified for a while.
Palm trees and 8
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will there be possible to have "CanvasBlock" on future browsers or are we stuck with CPU eating html5 animations?
ahh, the summary is wrong both from a W3C DOM standards perspective, because java is listed as the 2nd language supported by the W3C. the summary is wrong from a second perspective in that language bindings to HTML5-compliant web browser engines such as XulRunner and WebKit have been available for years. if Microsoft actually intend also to follow the HTML5 process properly, then it can be said that MSHTML, through its COM interface, also offers other language alternatives for decades rather than just years.
now it's a sad fact that nobody really *knows* that you can get at HTML5-compliant web browser engines and use DOM functions (3000+) and access DOM properties (20,000+) through XPCOM, or Glib/Gobject or COM, but it's perfectly possible. the best demonstration of this at its most extreme limit, taking advantage of absolutely all HTML5 W3C DOM features, is the http://pyjs.org/ pyjamas project, which abstracts the differences between these three major web browser engine types (XulRunner, Webkit and MSHTML aka Trident) and presents a single uniform API. on top this uniform API, normalising the discrepancies between the three engine types, an entire Desktop GUI Widget Set API has been created.
so the statement that there is "one HTML5 language: javascript" is just nonsense. for further examples of accessing HTML5 DOM using python, some of which will lead through to links to Ruby accessing HTML5 DOM such as AppCelerator, see http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebBrowserProgramming
One language (JavaScript) to rule them all, one data model (XML and DOM) to find them, one set of layout rules (CSS) to bring text, audio, video, and graphics and in the darkness bind them.
Why do I have a bad feeling about this?
No left turn unstoned.
Nope, HTML5 really makes the whole situation worse too, because rather than being a forward thinking spec, it takes everything that's been done wrong over the years, and makes it part of the standard. Then it adds in a load more stuff that appears half thought through (the video tag that doesn't do what it was originally intended for- standardised video), the semantic section tags, which only cover a tiny subset of the sections a site tends to have and which appears outdated before it's even launched (i.e. no comments section tags).
The ideology behind HTML5 is rather than create a new spec that tells people how things should be done, make a spec that takes everything bad people have done and make it standard, so that those incompetent developers are now adhering to the standard.
Overally it means more ambiguity, more jumble in the spec, stuff that might (has?) become obsolete before it's barely even used and that sort of thing.
HTML5 will change the web alright, back to the philosophy of hack it together any which way, who cares about lack of maintainbility, interoperability, accessibility and so forth. This seems an extremely backward way of doing things when web apps are getting ever more complex, and average Joes who publish are publishing via web apps anyway mitigating the need for them to get their hands dirty with markup.
HTML5 just doesn't come across as a professionally written spec, you compare it to other specs out there and it looks like it's been slapped together by a bunch of kids with no real experience of large scale software development.
The core assumption that users cared about filling correct metadata was wrong outside the research community (and even outside the IT research community). It will take off but you need software to fill in what was assumed users would do.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
HTML5 will improve security
While I love many things about HTML5, the idea of throwing out rendering libraries and starting again from scratch does not necessarily fill one with confidence about the security of the tools. Sure, less reliance on plug-ins means less opportunities for 3rd party security holes. But doing everything in the browser code itself also means that the potential attack vectors have more direct control over the machine. Plus any new library is going to have security vulnerabilities for a while.
I'm not saying HTML5 is insecure. But let's not kid ourselves: there will be a year or two of scrambling to fix new attack vectors.
The ______ Agenda
ZOMBO
Why are we using HTML5 and not XHTML 2?
XML abuses aside, XHTML is superior to HTML5.
HTML5 requires a more complex parser than XHTML ever will. XHTML can be validated for correctness, HTML5 is more difficult to do so.
I honestly don't understand the reason for following the HTML route. XHTML is already in an industry understood format that tools already exist for.
The market rarely reflects a superior technology. I still support XHTML. HTML5 is messy, ugly and a kludge.
All that needs to happen is to transfer some of the newer tags of HTML5 into XHTML. Perhaps we can borrow from the microformat peeps? Afterall, it's supposed to be modular.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
***HTML5 will allow applications to tap local file storage***
Once or twice a decade I encounter a "They can't possibly be serious" moment. This is one of those occasions.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The current versions of all the major browsers can now dynamically download fonts. We can finally stop putting display text in images. Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox (3.6 or greater) and IE are all on board with this. By IE 9, they'll even be using the same font format, Web Open Font Format. (Except for the iPad, which, for some weird reason, currently requires fonts in SVG format. But even the iPad understands "@font-face")
Few sites are using this capability yet. We are, as a demo. Try our steampunk search engine with authentic Victorian fonts.