Start Something Big
A crash course in HTML5
While there’s been a fair bit of controversy surrounding Apple’s continued reluctance to support Adobe’s Flash player for iPhones and now probably for iPads, The buzzword of the minute, and possibly the way of the iPad-fuelled future, is HTML5. What the devil is that, you ask? Well, I didn’t really know either so I did some research for us all to enjoy.
So, if you know what HTML is, we’re off to a good start. An acronym for hypertext markup language, HTML is the code that, along with some friends like CSS and Javascript, underpins pretty much the entire internet. It’s what web developers speak fluently, and is what the rest of us mere mortals must attempt to wade through when said web developers are unavailable for comment. Summed up best by John Herman, “It’s basically a set of instructions that a website hands to a browser, which the browser then reads and converts into a formatted page, full of text, images, links and whatever else”.
Now, on to HTML5. Pre-iPad, you may have heard HTML5 mentioned in regards to Youtube. The video sharing website announced in January this year that it would begin to support HTML5 video. While not yet supported by all browsers (Safari and Google Chrome are your safest bets) the primary feature of using HTML5 for Youtube is that it negates the need for Flash. So as Youtube stated on their official blog, “users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin”.
While this may all be geek-talk to some - flowing in one ear and out the other - you can probably still see how a streamlined solution to enabling rich content on website could be a worthwhile idea. In a HTML5 future, it wouldn’t matter whether you were viewing a website from your iPhone, PC, car or refrigerator, enjoying audio and video would become as simple as reading text - no plugins required.
Until the day when HTML5 is running mainstream though, Flash is still a necessary plugin for many online content options. And while Apple’s Steve Jobs may look like the shining beacon of HTML5 belief, Mr Adobe (CTO Kevin Lynch) does have a fairly firm platform from which to raise his criticism of the giant’s lack of Flash-love: widespread HTML5 support is a long way away. There are a lot of exciting features being brought about by the advent of HTML5 but, the reality is, we should make use of what we have in the meantime - even if we know better things are coming.
