

The Most Important Parts of HTML5 (or why video and audio tags are boring) - kanaka
http://blog.n01se.net/?p=375

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lukestevens
A quibble with the footnote - the author has muddled the history about the
WHATWG and W3C pretty badly. The W3C rejected the WHATWG's work initially in
2004; the WHATWG then created the HTML5 specification (largely by building on
Web Apps 1.0 + Web Forms 2.0) as a browser-backed guerilla group outside the
W3C. The W3C then adopted their work in 2006
(<http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166>), and a fragile partnership
with the WHATWG has been in place since. The W3C therefore deserves little
credit for the HTML5 spec - they declared HTML dead in 1998 after all, tried
to turn the web into XML (via XHTML), and then eventually came back to earth
in 2006.

\--

Surely it's also not simply being pedantic to insist that things like CSS3 (!)
and SVG don't get lumped into the "HTML5" catch-all. Pity the poor designer or
developer just getting to grips with this stuff who has to figure out what
someone means when they say "HTML5".

Nevertheless, as Mark Pilgrim said: "HTML5 will continue to be popular,
because anything popular will get labeled "HTML5"."
(<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/01/09/dive-into-2010>)

~~~
kanaka
I am aware of the history of WHATWG and you are right that its beginning was
largely a reaction to the intransigence of W3C at the time. However, the
current relationship is a healthy and collaborative one (I would certainly
wouldn't describe it as fragile any more). I would have been remiss not to at
least mention the WHATWG, but the footnote is already too long-winded and
giving a complete history of the Web was not my purpose (others have done that
better). There are many historical events that I painfully chose to omit
because while they are personally important to me, they didn't actually add to
the purpose of the post.

\--

I personally wish that there was a different term than "HTML5" to refer to the
additional work happening around and on the W3C HTML5 foundation. But,
unfortunately there is no replacement term that quite captures the full scope
of what most people mean when they use the term "HTML5". I share your
distaste: it has a version number in it for crying out loud, it can't refer to
something vague! I considered trying to use my post to promote "HTML5+" or
something similar so I would not contribute to the corruption of "HTML5". But
I decided that was the impossible fight the popular usage and chose to instead
pick a new term for the narrow reference "W3C HTML5".

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thristian
To me, the most important part of HTML5 is the parsing algorithm. Of the
eleventy-billion web-pages on the Internet, approximately zero percent of them
are properly-validating, standards-compliant HTML. It takes person-years of
labour, bug-reports and fixes to create a system that can reliably parse a
web-page as the original author expected, and that barrier-to-entry was a
pretty significant part of the original IE/Netscape duopoly.

Now, there's a plainly-described parsing algorithm in the HTML5 spec that
handles conformant documents correctly, and non-conformant documents sensibly,
and third-party implementations like html5lib[1]. Opening up a corpus the size
of the Internet to interested individuals and researches has to be a pretty
important achievement, I'd think.

[1]: <http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/>

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daviddaviddavid
No mention of microdata?

<http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/>

As someone who has had serious reservations about the so-called semantic web
being highjacked by academics who are out of touch with actual web
development, I gotta give props to Hixie & co. for the microdata spec.

Granted microdata is almost certainly the _least_ sexy part of HTML5 but it
might be worth mentioning.

~~~
kanaka
You're right. Although I don't think Microdata is quite important enough to be
in the main ten, I should have mentioned it in "All The Others". If you post
your comment to the blog I'll acknowledge that there.

~~~
daviddaviddavid
Thanks. Comment posted to your blog.

The microdata spec is uncommonly level-headed. Devs who are more at home
slinging jQuery than they would be writing OWL ontologies could get on top of
the spec with little effort.

Efforts like schema.org will only help push microdata into the mainstream.

------
watty
How are faster browsers and javascript engines part of HTML5?

~~~
jensnockert
They are not, but they make interesting stuff possible, unlike for example the
audio/video tags which right now are close to useless unfortunatly.

WebGL/WebCL etc. are not part of HTML5 either, doesn't mean that they are not
as game changing as the biggest features in HTML5.

~~~
watty
Kind of like how the internet has become the "cloud", all things related to
the browser are now "HTML 5".

~~~
harisenbon
While I agree with you, semantically, the author did already address that.

"Technically, HTML5 is a specification from the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) (Footnote 2). Many pedants will claim this is the only correct usage.
For the rest of us, HTML5 is a useful term to describe the rapid changes that
are currently happening to the Web platform."

~~~
spooneybarger
I don't know anyone who describes the rapid changes that are happening as
'HTML5'.

~~~
ugh
Then pay attention, I guess?

Nearly everyone is now using HTML5 in that sense.

~~~
scott_s
Nearly everyone _who_? I've only seen it used to mean things that are now
possible directly because of HTML5 features. Faster JavaScript engines do not
fall under that.

~~~
watty
I've never seen it used that way except from our marketing staff. Any
technologist should know better.

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chucknthem
One of the most important things I find in html 5 is not mentioned very often
is the media capture API[1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/> that
allows you to add video and audio as input. Combined with the audio and video
tags will let us implement video/audio chat features without using flash.

Not only that, but it can also bring speech to text to the web[2], potentially
add motion gestures for navigation, games, etc. Imo this is the last piece of
the puzzle (along with websockets, bytebuffers, etc) to making the browser a
full OS from a user's perspective.

[1] I would have said the devices tag, but that has recently been dropped from
the html5 standard. Ericson labs had some really great demos of it on a
modified webkit engine)<http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/>, too bad.
[2] see x-webkit-speech attribute of the input tag for chrome's implementation

~~~
kanaka
The media-capture API approach has stagnated. I think most of the energy and
focus has shifted to WebRTC (<http://webrtc.org>).

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panabee
Interesting. How long do you think before HTML5 video can displace Flash and
other proprietary players?

~~~
lukestevens
IMO, quite a while - on the one hand, HTML5 video in the form of H.264 is
mandatory if you want your stuff playable on iOS devices; on the other, the
codec situation is a bit of a mess (search for WebM v H.264 and weep). Then
factor in DRM, streaming, features like full screen playback (though a recent
API in Mozilla/Webkit has just appeared I think), plus the two-encoded-
version-to-suit-all-modern-browsers issue and the most likely case (again imo)
is Flash video will be around for years yet.

~~~
kanaka
You've certainly identified some of the issues with the video tag for
replacing Flash for video.

But the thing that may keep Flash kicking for years to come may actually be
advertising. It's a pretty small matter for Google to reencode their youtube
library as WebM (which they are doing) compared to getting all web advertising
firms to switch from Flash (for which they know well and have well established
tools and workflows) to HTML/HTML5 based advertising.

