Posted by Tim Hilliard (Developer)
As a web developer, I feel that we are moving into some pretty exciting times. First, it seems that big companies are slowly starting to listen to the grumble associated with IE6 and are moving to IE8. Not long ago, IE6 was finally toppled as the market-leading browser and IE8 took over the reins. The other exciting news comes in the new HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. Although not fully finished, some browsers have already implemented many of the features that have been locked into these specifications. Leading the way thus far, in my opinion, are Chrome and Safari, with Firefox hot on their heels.
With these new technologies rapidly making their way into the mainstream, we are moving into the era of the web app. What this means for consumers is that you will no longer be required to buy a piece of software that needs to be installed on your computer; the application will now live in the browser. This means that an application built using HTML5 will be fully compatible across all platforms.
The first feature that I would like to talk about is local storage. The HTML5 specification now allows for multiple types of local storage, including a database. A good example of an app that could use this would be web-based email. The email application lives in the browser but has the ability to be used offline. Simply speaking, if you want to write an email while you are on the train, and have no wi-fi or phone signal, you can just go to the app, compose and send an email, and it will store it in local memory until such time that it can connect to the internet again and send the message. This may seem like a pretty trivial example, but I can assure you, the implications are massive. The power to store great amounts of data in the browser means web apps can now compete with executable applications.
Along with the ability to store data in the browser, HTML5 now gives us the ‹video› and ‹audio› tags, making video and audio files native to the browser. Previously, these files could only be run using plug-ins like Adobe Flash. Now the files can be added directly into the HTML mark-up and treated just like any other element on the page. This allows us to apply a z-index to our videos and add lovely CSS, like reflections and rotations, to bring our video even further along, as well as using JavaScript to apply flashy animations.
The last and probably most important improvement that I want to talk about is the inclusion of new tags to define how the page is actually structured. These are important for the progression of accessibility and search-engine optimisation. These tags will be able to tell aids, such as screen readers, what links are part of a navigation and which links are more important than others, as well as what section is the main content. As far as SEO is concerned, spiders will be able to gauge which elements in a page are more important than others, as well as identify which section is the main content of the page, giving it more weight.
With browsers introducing more and more of these features, we are starting to see some of the potential that HTML5 has to offer. I'm going to leave you with a link to an interesting example of the new canvas element. Remember: you need a browser with HTML5 capabilities to view this example. Each dot can be clicked on and represents a tweet: http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/