HTML5 is an even worse term than AJAX; it doesn't really mean what you'd think, instead it's a somewhat nebulous grab-bag of a term that generally means different things to different people.
HTML5 itself is an attempt to standardize features that lack spec but that have nevertheless been implemented in mostly the same way in most real world browsers out there, combined with an attempt to add niche features that only one browser has but that feel like a good idea. Specifically this refers to a broad set of subsets of the entire HTML5 spec. The major players on the list are canvas, video/audio, the semantic tags (footer, nav, header, section, etc), CSS3 (that's a pretty big spec all by itself), @font-face, Web Workers, offline mode, WebSocket, and every other spoke on this thing: http://html5readiness.com/ Note that many of those things existed before HTML5. For example, canvas has been around for a long long time all the way back to when apple introduced the dashboard in OS X Tiger. @font-face has been around since IE6 and in fact works on that (with some caveats), offline mode and workers come from the now deprecated Google Gears project, CSS3 has probably existed in one form or another the longest. HTML5 is thus not really a boolean proposition. It's simply a convenient banner that has only one useful meaning: Innovating browsers. "HTML5" as applied to building websites usually means something quite different. It can mean any of the following things and usually it means a combination of any number of things on the list: - Doing things that are normally done with flash with plain jane HTML. This doesn't HAVE to be done via HTML5 subset features. For example, doing a game using sprite-like animation techniques based on equally sized divs with javascript changing their classes so their background images keep changing would probably work on Navigator 4, and yet many would call it "HTML5". - presuming a speedy javascript engine on the client. - Targetting the latest browsers and using conditional javascript- based 'fix scripts' that rewrite your CSS and HTML on-the-fly for older browsers, thus 'emulating' certain newer features. For example, emulating rounded corners and rotations in IE6 with ActiveX filter CSS. This includes an attitude of "Screw em if they don't wanna upgrade", though keep in mind the next point. - Incremental dynamic behaviour. Instead of building a site with bells and whistles, build a plain site and then use javascript to add bells and whistles. This way folks on old browsers and for example blind people with screen readers can still see a simpler version of your site instead of nothing at all (which would happen if your site is all flash, though technically you can embellish a site with flash too, it's just less common amongst flash developers to do things that way, and it's much more difficult). - Using jQuery or some other javascript-based developer plugin. Exactly why a random selection of the above things is called "HTML5" is as much of a mystery as why dynamic web pages are called "AJAX", but that's nevertheless what "HTML5" usually means. On May 18, 10:32 pm, Karsten Silz <karsten.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > So let's just forget for a minute, if we can, that Apple is in blatant > violation of the Geneva Convention for not supporting Flash on the > iPhone and iPad, and just talk about HTML 5 on its own merits. > > HTML 5 is supposedly five years away or so - heck, there's still IE 6 > out there, and the standard won't ready for a couple of years. So you > can only use it for mobile phones that have Webkit browsers and get at > least 1 major firmware a year (make that five if it's an Android > phone, except for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 which just came out and > shipped with the old Android 1.6 and won't be upgraded to 2.1 until > later in Q4, and by then there's probably two new Android versions out > already). > > That's what I thought when I read this > article:http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/where-on-the-web-is-html5 > > There were a couple of interesting facts in it: > > - Slide sharing site Scribd recently switched from Flash to HTML 5 and > claims to run on 90% of all browsers out there, including good ol' IE > 6 (well, Safari 4 on Mac is apparently not in there, because the > formulas here were screwed up for > me:http://www.scribd.com/documents/5/Image-Cluster-Compression). > Apparently, you can use Javascript and CSS styles as a partial > fallback for browser that lack (specific) HTML 5 support. You can > read more about the conversion > here:http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/scribd-switches-from-flash-to-html5/ > > - HTML 5 borrows some elements from Docbook with its new structural > tags, like <header>, <footer>, <section> and <article>. This should > make posting and parsing documents easier, and I'm not sure it's in > Flash (or Silverlight). > > - A lot of the HTML 5 elements, as they are known today, are already > implemented in many browsers, which you can see on this nice HTML 5 > page (that looked fine on my Mac):http://html5readiness.com/ > > So, does that mean HTML 5 will be ready for mainstream web projects > before, say, 2015? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. 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