You don’t have to be a nerd to know that HTML is something to do with computers. Maybe you even know it’s an acronym that stands for “Hypertext Markup Language” but did you know the HTML standards we use today have been around since the early 1990s? That’s an eternity in computer years.
Naturally, things have changed a bit since then, but remarkably, HTML (currently standardized on version 4 since 1997) has remained very much the same as it was back then. That is, until now.
Starting in 2008, and hopefully wrapping up in the next year or two, HTML version 5 has been under development. This will mean many very cool things coming to the internet as well as how you experience the web, especially for users of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.
While HTML5 isn’t the standard yet, most browsers (including Safari on iOS devices) already support many of its features. One of the biggest things HTML5 supports is multimedia. In the past, if you wanted to display audio, or video, you needed to use something like Adobe’s Flash. Support for this on most mobile devices, including Apple devices, has been poor or nonexistent.
With multimedia features in HTML5, flash is a thing of the past. Audio and video can be embedded on pages in much the same way that images are now. This allows your device to be much smarter about what it does with the content, and this translates to a much better experience for you when you’re viewing that content. It won’t matter if you’re looking at something on your computer or your iPad, either. The experiences will be virtually identical.
HTML5 also promises to provide for a much richer experience on the web with support for things like a canvas that allows amazingly high quality 2-D and 3-D graphics rendering right inside your browser! And again, this will all work on any device. It also supports embedded vector graphics, which can allow for a level of interactivity with graphics that just isn’t possible with previous versions HTML. There are already plenty of amazingly creative demos of these new features out there. It’s exciting to see all the things people come up with using these new features.
The takeaway here is that with mobile devices becoming more ubiquitous and more powerful, web standards have had to keep up. With HTML5, the standards are actually starting to lead the devices a bit. As mobile computing power converges with these new standards, the web will be in for some big changes.