|
Visitors to such sites as BBC or Associated Press (AP) find it irritating whenever they click on the play button to a must-watch video only to be slapped with the words: you do not have the correct version of the flash. Well, with the coming of HTML 5 such-like HTML 4.0 discrepancies are soon going to be a thing of the past.
HTML 5 is set to revolutionize how web browsers perform their function of retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web in an unprecedented fashion.
Lachlan Hunt, who has worked as a front-end web developer and also actively contributes to the work on HTML5, says that this HTML version will enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications. This is through the many features it comes with and that is including the one that enables it to successfully entrench and control multimedia itself, a functionality that many sites have relied on flash or other external plug-ins to provide.
There are even more distinct features of this new version of HTML on which work commenced in 2004 and that is currently a joint effort between W3CHTMLWG and WHATWG and supported by such organizations as Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and others.
Hunt also talks of “a new set of elements to structure pages.” As most HTML4 pages have structures such as headers, footers, and columns commonly marked using div elements due to a lack of the “necessary semantics for describing these parts,” HTML5 addresses this default by introducing new elements to represent each of these different sections.
The div elements of header, footer, and horizontal navigation bar below the header of a typical HTML4 page are replaced by new elements of header, nav, section, article, aside, and footer in the new HTML5 page.
Previous versions of HTML and XHTML are defined in terms of their syntax; HTML on the other hand is being defined in terms of the Document Object Model (DOM) so that language can be defined independently of the syntax.
Some noteworthy functional features are addressed in the site Geektechnica.
The website talks of “5 Amazing HTML5 features to look forward to.” Apart from the video element other four features are “Hyper-Threading for web browsers” as separate background threads are used to do processing without affecting the performance of a webpage,
the canvas element that let one “render graphics and images on the fly.”
A cache application that will enable those with intermittent internet problems to store web apps such as emails locally and access them without connecting to the internet is another feature. Geektechnica notes that a Google gears that enables Gmail users to access their accounts offline is an implementation of HTML5 specifications.
The last feature is geolocation. This API, reports the site, defines location information with high-level interface (GPS) associated with the device hosting the API. And this can only be used if you grant application permission to use the information. No need to worry about the possibility of being stalked.
Apart from Google, other websites that have already started using some HTML5 features incudes Apple.com. Apple has embraced this technology in their video tags. On Apple’s production website videos are playing without the flash but html5 video tag.
The architects of this version of HTML approximate 2022 as the year when the final version of this device shall hit the markets. But companies such as Google and Apple are already using them which mean that we don’t have to wait for that long after all.
But in the mean while the architects are warning against full experimentation with this version as the features so far revealed can be altered. The work is still ongoing.
The writer is a content developer and web researcher working with Webmasters Kenya . You can contact him through,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed