Who Knew?
So here’s something that’s been getting a lot of buzz recently - with the recent release of Firefox 3.5, every major browser except Internet Explorer now supports HTML5, the new spec for the programming language that the Web is built on. It’s an open standard that competes with proprietary technologies, and they’re taking aim at plugins like Flash and Silverlight this time around, with support for audio and video embeds.
Google’s a big proponent of anything that advances the open web, and as a demonstration of the spec’s potential they’ve created a YouTube page coded entirely in HTML. (If you have the latest version of Safari, Firefox or Chrome, it should work.) It looks exactly like the regular player, but it’s created entirely with HTML instead of utilizing a memory-intensive plugin. The Video Bay (TPB’s video hub) also uses HTML5 to work, but with today’s announcements it’s unclear whether that site has a future.
Microsoft is dismissing HTML5 as a spec that won’t be ready for another few years, and since it has more than 50% of the browser market, it knows that it has nothing to worry about - the spec isn’t going to be widely-adopted by web designers until Microsoft signs on. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as companies like Google and Apple push for HTML5 adoption - could YouTube switch to an all-HTML5 website, shutting Internet Explorer out?
