crazyskillsbloginitiative

crazyskills.net/html5.php [crazyskills.net]

Please note you will need an HTML 5 compliant browser to see this page properly, and so far, none of the HTML 5 browsers have full support for all the tags, but it’s still pretty cool.

Yeah, so what is it¹, what browsers support it², what good is it³ and when is it going to be the standard⁴?

¹ HTML 5 is the next generation of the standardized hypertext markup language. This is the language that internet pages are written in (somewhat simplified.)

² HTML 5 is currently supported by Firefox v3.5b99 and Safari 4.

³ It supports native embedding of richer media than HTML 4. For instance, HTML 5 supports the <video> tag. What this means is less (eventually no) reliance on 3^rd party embedded applications such as Flash or Silverlight. HTML 5 also supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) version 3. A css file is what gives text and other parts of internet pages attributes such as color, underlining, paragraph formatting, and more.

⁴ When HTML 5 [w3.org]/ CSS 3 [w3.org] will actually be the standard is a tough question. It could take years, I suppose, though a draft has been available since January 2008 (W3C). The changes being added are going to make the internet better for everyone, arguably moreso than the transition from HTML 3 to HTML 4 did. (December 1997)

To sum up, there is a great deal of effort being put into these new technologies. The internet is moving further toward a rich multimedia experience and richer development environments as well. This is the direction the internet is going. It will really be something to watch this come to be, and as usual the crazyskills dev team will be making the most of the new technologies - bringing them to a browser near you. We’ll keep ya posted.

For a little demo of some of what is coming, check out www.dloh.org [dloh.org] if you are using an HTML 5 supported browser (listed above.) It’s pretty cool, but it is really a demo of the technical side of things and not everyone will be able to appreciate it. Another interesting site is this one [alistapart.com] which does not demo HTML 5 but delves into the changes and streamlining to code. It’s an older article (120407) but touches on a few of the new tags to be added to HTML 5.