Monday, August 3, 2009

Here's looking at you: HTML5

Continued from earlier post: http://ronnie05.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/vvlj/


Lack of Extensibility

One of the new things HTML 5 sets out to do is to provide web developers with a standardized set of semantic page layout structures. However, the new elements may not be entirely forward-compatible, as they are constrained to today’s understanding of what makes up a page. An extensible mechanism, although less straightforward, would offer more room to grow as the web evolves.HTML5 does add new elements like header, nav, article, section, aside, and footer which expand the structural definition of a page, but does not provide the level of extensibility that people have been seeking.

Documents versus Applications:

From a future perspective, HTML5 is seen as a document publishing, however, in its present avatar it is painfully evident that it lacks the tools it needs to describe the documents sufficiently.

There is also a burning need to address the short-comings of HTML for web applications —especially when it comes to being able to build rich web applications for mobile devices.

While most of the smartphones in the world use the Webkit in some form or the other and HTML 5 will have to build upon this platform as a base, it is worth bringing to notice that Webkit Does Not Equal HTML5 Support… Yet

To be clear, just because a device uses webkit does not mean that it has the latest version of Webkit and can use HTML5. Recognizing the market share of Webkit is important solely as an indicator that a significant portion of smart phones will have access to HTML5 sometime in the near future.

There is great incentive for mobile operating system vendors to upgrade to the latest versions of Webkit. They see the success that the iPhone has had and the fact that one of the main contributors to that success was the browsing experience. They understand that not many companies can afford to develop native applications for all of the various platforms which makes the features of HTML5 attractive.

Because of this, expect browser improvements are a high priority for mobile operating systems.

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