Helping your business to do more business
Wednesday, 06 October 2010
HTML 5 has been getting a lot of coverage over the past few months in both the IT press and blogs, with most of the browser manufacturers now committing to support parts of it, no doubt in some cases just to score a few headlines. But what does it all mean for us as businesses at a practical level today?
Let's start by explaining what HTML 5 is, for those readers who don't know. HTML 5 is the next version of HTML the language of the web, that browsers interpret and render to display web pages such as this one. Several years ago the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) took the mess that HTML had become during the browser wars of the nineties and created the standards that we try to adhere to today, HTML 4 and xHTML (my own preference), not forgetting CSS and several other related technologies.
Once those standards had been ratified work started on HTML 5, which has reached the stage where early proposals for the new standard have been tabled. That's all well and good and there are certainly some interesting new tags that have been proposed (I'm by no means an expert in HTML 5 and like most others I base my opinions on what I've read). So progress is being made, but unfortunately it is incredibly slow and I've read some reports that say the new standard won't be ratified until 2022 no doubt due to all the committees that will debate it.
The problem is that some of those tags are needed now (as many in the design community believe), and so having just reached a point where all the major browsers pretty much interpret the existing standards in the same way (well almost, there are still some issues), the browser developers are now talking up what bits of HTML 5 they are going to support today. Now in theory that's no bad thing as long as they all support the same tags and interpret them in the same way, but that's a eutopian view and it isn't what appears to be happening in the real world.
Just as in the browser wars of the nineties marketing and competitive advantage seem to be creeping into the debate and so we have the prospect of different browsers supporting the same tags in different ways. Now that puts us straight back to where we were before IE8 came out with its improved support for the existing standards.
This is particularly true with one of the more useful of the proposed tags, the <video> tag. In theory it's a great idea, hosting video directly in the browser and so eliminate the need for external plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight. Unfortunately the browser manufacturers can't agree on the underlying video codecs that should be supported (a codec is short for coder/decoder and is software that either encodes or decodes the video in a particular format, there are several competing video formats). To me, without a common standard supported codec it makes any given browsers support for the video tag about as useful as a chocolate fire guard. Why? because the last thing I want to have to do when uploading video on my or a customers site is upload 2 or more different versions encoded to different formats which are then displayed depending on the browser the user is using. I really don't want to expose my customers to the potential bugs and issues that such a scenario will inevitable bring.
Where does that leave us? Well, in my opinion, exactly where we are now, we've got the HTML 4 & xHTML standards implemented fairly well in the major browsers plus technologies such as Silverlight or Flash for playing video. There are some issues but on the whole those technologies work, and are proven since we're using them now, so I for one am going to continue to look on the development of HTML 5 with interest but am certainly not going to be leaping in any time soon, even when there is support in (some) browser(s) for it.
Update - 7/10/10: Since writing this post I came across this article on Infoworld, it seems a W3C official also thinks we should hold off deploying HTML 5 on the open web.