HTML 5

Imagine you can do the following with a browser: reading, writing, drawing, watching video, playing games, managing data of databases, handling local and remote files, ...  Would anyone still need any OS (e.g. Windows, iOS, Android) with such a powerful browser.  This is what HTML5 promises.  Isn't this what Google has wanted to achieve with its Chrome. With HTML5, all standard compliant browsers would be so powerful. Shouldn't software developers drop all the platforms they are targeting, and flock to HTML5?

Well, there is a problem with HTML5 currently - not a single browser is promised to support all the features in a specific time frame. How long will it take for all the major browsers to support all the features? Let us use CSS 3 as an example to check the track record of browsers supporting web standards.  CSS 1 was published in 1996, and CSS 3 draft was published 1999.  It is 2011 now,  but many modules of CSS 3 are yet to become recommendations, and browsers are yet to support all the published features. For instance, the popular round corner feature was first announced in 2005, but IE8 still does not support it now.  How difficult is it to support this feature? Probably one or two days work for a seasoned programmer at most. Supporting HTML5 is an order of magnitude more challenging than supporting CSS considering the former needs to deal with both local and remote resources, various complex codecs such as H.264, MPEG,  and numerous protocols such as TCP, HTTP, RTSP, RTP. It would not be surprising to see that HTML5 will be so mature and widely supported that we can say bye-bye to Silverlight, Flash, Java plug-in 5 to 10 years later.

Now, HTML5 is essentially a beautiful dream, but it will come true eventually.  I will keep watching its progress, and look forward to its eventual wide adoption.