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."

Comments

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

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.

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.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[WiglyWorm]

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 .

Re:Who freaking cares

[element-o.p.]

: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.

Re:Cool, but...

[skids]

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.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Lennie]

I don't know how it is in the US, a lot of the time this is all self-taught. Because pretty much no-one seems to teach HTML/CSS/JS/etc. properly in school/university and so on.

Javascript is one of the most used programming languages and because it looks simple or familair most people assume it is, but in reallity it is the probably the least understood language by frequent developers. Most have no clue what prototypal inheritance is for example.

Also the Javascript name is just a marketing ploy because it has nothing to do with Java.

The core of the language is very small and was created and working in just 10 days.

It is a functional programming language with a C-syntax.

With the recent creating of node.js (a fully event-driven framework for writing network programs) Javascript has also become much more populair on the server.

Node.js was created in 2009 and is already almost the most watched project on github.com for example.

There introduction video where the creator/author explains what it is about:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=dahl-node

So it is just an event-loop just like a webserver like nginx.

One of the design goals is actually:

The API should be both familiar to client-side JS programmers and old school UNIX hackers.

I guess that applies to me twice. :-)