This week I’ve attended meeting of London-GTUG (Google Technology Users Group). Main themes of the meeting were Chrome Extensions and HTML5. First part was interesting, but not inspiring – the Firefox plugins are widely available, Chrome Extensions just close the gap between the browsers. I like the architecture of Extensions and reasonable restrictions Google put on available APIs. All information are available on Chrome Extensions Lab page.
On the other hand, the HTML5 show put some new ideas in my mind. I like new semantic tags like <header/footer>, <time>, I love new styles (after 20 years we will finally have rounded corners :)), new attributes (“default if empty” for input fields) and other minor stuff like new types of input fields. But the real revolution lies in HTML’s multimedia capabilities. HTML currently supports audio and video embedding with full control over the elements from JavaScript; there are transitions to allow define movement of elements and my personal favourite – canvas. Where’s canvas and bunch of developers, there will be frameworks that will make it really usable. And this canvas gets access to GPU, so it’s fast. I will observe WebGL closely. This may be a foundation of revolution in PLM world!
Is HTML5 a flash-killer? If you compare capabilities, it may seem so, but the battle is not lost for Adobe yet. At the moment there are no IDEs that let developers use full potential of new capabilities. And the browser support is still quite poor with Internet Explorer in lead in department of ignoring new standard. Adobe has some time to make a leap forward and run away before HTML folks produce something stable and popular enough.
Btw: Someone took a decision to stop numbering HTML, so we should not talk about HTML5 – it’s just HTML now. How do you tell what capabilities are supported by your browser? IMHO it will make some mess in two or three years. I don’t understand why they did it.
