Slashdot Mirror
In-Depth Look At HTML5
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."
They can accept it all day long and want to distribute software that will encode and decode h.264, but where do you expect for them to get the money for the per-copy royalties from? Of course, being unwilling to push software that is inherently un-free is acting like a little kid.
How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.
c++;
You are thinking of title text. Alt text is intended for accessibility for screen readers and other non-image capable browsers. It is not a caption, it is an alternate .
Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp
And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp
I recall when the web was young people would claim "I program in HTML!" I was like "yeah, I can insert 'bold' and 'a' tags too..." In the beginning, HTML was nothing more than what the name says it is -- a markup language. (Of course "language" somehow means programming? No it doesn't...)
Well, now things are different, of course. Web programming today is real programming for some... still markup for others. But now the web is becoming more than a presentation medium which is very exciting I think.
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
I want my Cowboyneal
Well, pushing software that has no hardware support and provides no clear advantage to the end-user over H.264 is.. something. Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too. OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
:rolleyes:
Because I was smart enough to care about emerging technology in high school and college instead of sex and drugs, I now have a well-paying job that provided me with a very, very nice house in one of the nicer parts of my town, the perfect motorcycle for my needs, an airplane, a late model truck and a (modest, granted) recording studio in one of the extra bedrooms in the aforementioned very, very nice house. As if that weren't enough, I have a smokin' hot wife and a daughter who makes life worth living, even if I didn't have any of the material possessions I mentioned first. Life is good. So, yeah, I'd say HTML5 probably will make some of us happy.
YMMV. Keep drinking cheap beer and chasing skirts while living in your mom's basement if you want, but when you find yourself old, fat, broke and alone, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Well, despite the fact that XML and HTML are abysmal markup languages, they are a heck of a lot better and more consistent than the off-the-cuff designed-by-horses carnivals you find in PDF and other markup languages that started as internal document formats for proprietary word processors. Consistent design leads to more well organized, less complex code.
In addition, since HTML5 is coming with declarative animation features embedded, and on the heels of active use of the DOM, it has to be designed with performance in mind -- so there's a counterweight for the tendency for bloat to accrue.
That said, with HTML looking to become a "living standard" after HTML5 or in other words, complete anarchy, there will be space for a streamlined markup language to make gains again in another half decade or so -- if someone can finally produce something that doesn't suck for human readability and for complex relationships that transcend tree structures. Perhaps we will have the first popular non-textual markup language by decades end.
Someone had to do it.
Since you mention codecs, Google just released a version of VP8 for the WebM project. The improvements are noteworthy.
H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016.
You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
How do you think H.264 started out ? With zero hardware support, this is where VP8 was a few months ago. Now they have a few hardware manufacturers that ship VP8 built in. Any many said they would do the same. The whole H.264 / VP8 debate is also about looking at the future not just now.
New things are always on the horizon
Would you buy a book written in disappearing ink?
"It's fine, you can read it right now, no problem!" ?
Not everything lasts forever. In fact, only few things do. You ate food yesterday and that ain't coming back. Nor is your ex-girlfriend. Sometimes you just have to move on and do other things.