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Will HTML5 reshape the Web world?

A focus event in the first half of 2010 attracted the attention of many people, many of whom were aware of the existence of HTML5 for the first time. Those who first know HTML5 may be surprised that the HTML5 specification was developed as early as six years ago, and although the draft HTML5 specification is very good, it is still uncertain when it will actually become a standard.

Indeed, the work of the HTML5 specification committee is progressing very slowly. Because browser vendors and others have too many ideas about how to improve browsers and the Web world, and it takes time for them to be converged into the HTML5 specification and agreed upon. Although many new tags and JavaScript functions have been tested on some browsers, interoperability and standardization issues have not been solved. For example, Apple's HTML5 demos are impressive, but they only work well on Safari. That's why Flash supporters laugh at HTML5 for bringing Web back to the browser wars of 2000.

While this ridicule may make HTML5 supporters sad, and the long wait is indeed difficult, it would be wrong to ignore HTML5. Because behind HTML5 there is not only the promotion of industry giants, but more importantly, standardization is the inevitable trend of the development of IT technology. As far as software is concerned, both browsers and related development tools will continue to absorb a variety of technologies around them, and finally standardize them, which is the inevitable law of technological development.

To be sure, HTML5 will change every aspect of the Internet, and it's clear that it won't completely replace Flash, but HTML5 will reshape the Internet so that browsers can do more work without plug-ins, from location tracking to saving data to the cloud. HTML5 tags will replace plug-ins that accomplish relatively simple tasks, at least for some time, it can develop some advanced features to more users. In the end, it may make the Internet safer, more efficient and more flexible.

So where will HTML5, which is about to become the new standard, take us? Here are some ideas from developers, programmers, and designers to see how HTML5 has changed the Internet.

Reduce the importance of plug-ins

Once upon a time, the Web world welcomed browser plug-ins because it encouraged innovative ideas and bold experiments, and sound, animation, and other very vivid web pages, plug-ins developed by Sun, Adobe, RealAudio, Microsoft, and other companies, were really refreshing when they first appeared on the web. However, the problem soon arises: the interface of the plug-in is open to everyone, everyone is trying to add new functionality to the old, text-based world, and chaos is inevitable. One of the most famous plug-ins is Flash, and other similar plug-ins are numerous.

Apple forbids Adobe's Flash from running on its own platform for a variety of reasons, which prevents Apple fans from seeing Flash on the Apple platform, and the popularity of HTML5 will stop this conflict, and it will phase out relatively closed development systems: JavaFX may be really powerful, but why learn another syntax when JavaScript and Canvas objects can do the same thing? If video tags can synchronize audio and video, who needs Real's ecosystem?

So, will all the plug-ins really disappear? Maybe, but it depends on what you want to do. If your goal is to draw images, then Canvas objects may be sufficient. But if you want to build a professional 3D world, as you can see in complex Flash and Shockwave games, you may also have to rely on proprietary plug-in technologies that can directly access video hardware and run 3D games.

Support for dynamic image generation

In the past, the images displayed on a web page came from directly downloaded GIF or JPG images, while in HTML5, images might not come directly from the image file, but were temporarily generated by a Canvas (canvas) object. A large number of very good graphics libraries have appeared on the network, and the existence of these graphics libraries makes it easier to generate images dynamically.

Today, the JavaScript layer can calculate based on the data and draw graphs. If software developers have enough time and talent, they can make everything on the network more vivid, while there is less and less plain text content. Flash is just the beginning, and the HTML5 environment makes it easier for Web developers to develop complex images. Similar tools have emerged in the market that will further improve the ability of Web developers to navigate images, and as the tools mature, developers will develop more professional and complex graphics.

One problem that may exist here is that this kind of image processing may put a great burden on the client processor, such as certain requirements on the processing power of the client processor. In the past, some developers were afraid to use Flash plug-ins at all, because rendering and rendering Flash content could put a lot of pressure on the processor and greatly affect the user's final experience. This should not be a problem in the future, developers should not let users experience vivid images for fear of affecting performance, but developers should make a compromise choice. Anyone who complains about the impact of Flash on performance should know that this has nothing to do with the technology itself. The problem is that designers use the technology too much to get our attention.

Allow Web programs to take advantage of local storage

Web programmers have long been able to use the browser-side local storage space to store a lot of information. For example, IE allows up to 300 Cookie and up to 4096 bytes of content. However, to develop truly practical Web programs, you may need more storage space than this. For example, the previous Dojo toolkit used the Flash plug-in to allocate some space on a user's hard drive, leaving it for browsers, but now it's easy to do the same with HTML5.

Programmers can use this part of storage according to their own needs, such as saving cloud service applications and data on local hard drives. This also makes the delivery, installation and deployment of cloud applications very much like traditional applications. For example, cloud applications can run as usual regardless of whether they have an Internet connection or not, because the JavaScript code for the HTML5 application has been downloaded from the server and saved locally.

Of course, the application of this technology will not affect the popularity of cloud applications, because the current mode of operation is very different from that in the past, and the local database actually acts as an intelligent cache. In addition, game developers can store some situational information and equipment information locally, which can avoid downloading these information every time the computer is connected, and save the time of downloading materials. The downside is that these databases are buried deep in the system folder, so that the data backup becomes very complex. Data migration may become more complex if users want to migrate data from one machine to another.

Perhaps the emergence of a hybrid cloud may solve this problem, which allows data to be stored both in the cloud and locally, while the local computer simply caches the data, and the final version is saved in the cloud so that it can be accessed from any computer.

Simplify data extraction in Web development

Web developers who have extracted data from web pages know that the existing HTML structure provides almost no meaningful information other than telling browsers where the information is. Developers need to know the information about the data itself, which can help programmers understand the true meaning of the data. The so-called Microformat in HTML5 introduces a new mechanism, which adds some special tags to HTML to help programmers analyze the true meaning of the data in the tags.

No one can predict how many changes microformats will bring to the network, but it is easy to see that this new mechanism will bring great convenience to programmers and help programmers develop more efficient Web applications. For example, if there is a good, standard way to represent dates and times, programmers do not need to write special code to analyze or guess what time format others might use when developing time-related Web programs for websites. In this way, calendars, schedules, schedules, and other applications that need to collect time information from multiple data sources become a very simple task.

Support for location-based services

In the Web world, we used to know only its IP address, but we have no idea what kind of real world those numbers correspond to. For example, it was almost impossible to know where a computer was in the past, but now location-based services can solve this problem. The HTML5 standard allows JavaScript to ask browser users about their geographic location, such as latitude and longitude. This feature is not usually supported on desktop systems (because of the need for GPS or Wi-Fi), but it works if the terminal is a handheld smartphone.

Today, no one knows what applications smart programmers will create based on this location information, but one thing is certain: the future will be able to integrate the virtual world with the real world in an unpredictable and incredible way.

Make Web video play more smoothly

The video tag in HTML5 makes it easy for Web developers to integrate video content with other content in the web page, and also allows those who are engaged in jQuery and PHP development to join the Web development team, so that Web development is no longer just the monopoly of Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX developers.

Although this idea looks tempting, there are still many difficulties because no codecs are specified in the HTML5 standard, and everyone wants to publish their own video and audio codecs. This means that we replace one mess with another: it's just that in the past we called the software embedded in browsers plug-ins, but today we call it codecs. So today we have a standard video tag, but browsers may or may not know how to interpret the video content.

Erich Ocean, a lecturer in HTML5 application development who teaches in Los Angeles, thinks the war between codecs and codecs continues. Computer developers and Mozilla organizations are wrong to think they can set video standards for video professionals. 'We see Google's new video format being used in some places, such as on YouTube, but it will never be as popular as H.264,'he said.

Although video playback may face a chaotic situation because everyone can not reach an agreement, the new video tag will certainly enrich Internet video content, and web pages will become the main source of video content, while there will be less and less text content. It's just that it's not necessarily a good thing for children's education, because children are becoming more and more used to watching animation and spend little time reading, let alone writing.

Widget will be richer

Widget running in iframe allows pages to embed content from other sites (such as weather forecasts), which is very practical and popular, but for security reasons, these Widget have been running in a relatively independent environment, basically isolated from the rest of the page.

HTML5 provides a standard mechanism for these Widget to communicate with each other. Although they are still unable to enter each other's operating environment, they can already send messages to each other to work together.

Advertisers have been waiting for this for a long time, and they are eager to integrate banner ads scattered across the same page, and from a development point of view, developers are sure to find other practical uses. For example, the picture of a tennis match played on the Web page can be synchronized with the player information on the left and right sides, which was unthinkable in the era of HTML 1.0.

However, the mechanism for sending messages and communicating with each other is just the beginning, and the next urgent problem to be solved is the problem of communication protocols, because there is no standard in this area so far. Only by setting a standard for the transmission of information will it be possible for Widget developed by two different development teams to communicate with each other. In other words, both sides of the communication need more standard vocabulary.

Improve the security of the browser

Each browser plug-in is a separate application, different browser plug-ins are developed by different programmers according to different standards, release time is different, security model is also different. Naturally, some plug-ins are more secure than others. As there are more and more plug-ins in browsers, it becomes more and more complex to track possible security vulnerabilities in each browser plug-in. For example, it may be hard for anyone to remember whether the security vulnerability in your enterprise at the end of last year was caused by plug-ins or browsers, and finally solved by upgrading browsers rather than plug-ins, or vice versa.

Building many functions into HTML5 instead of using plug-ins can greatly reduce security risks, avoid problems in many aspects related to plug-in development, and prevent people from deliberately using API in plug-ins to install malicious code. Because relatively speaking, the security of Firefox, Chrome, or IE browsers is usually audited by more people (including the security team). If the security team thinks that a browser is secure, in general, the security risk must be much less.

However, there is a degree of major speculation about the improvement in security here. There will always be some people in this world who use their ingenuity in evil ways, and it is entirely possible for them to take advantage of certain characteristics of HTML5 to engage in malicious acts. It's just that no one can predict what dangers might be hidden in HTML5's new features.

Simplify Web development

The words of a developer who works for a Web software development company are typical, and it succinctly describes the changes that HTML5 can bring. I prefer HTML5 mainly because it enables me to develop in a unified development environment where browsers plus JavaScript and DOM don't have to switch back and forth between the Flash world and the HTML5 world, he said. In the future, as long as you master a development language and a toolset, you can develop any plug-in.

'i think the benefits are also obvious for users, and now Flash seems to have created another world in the Internet world,'he added.

Indeed, HTML5 uses a unified language (JavaScript), unified data model (XML and DOM) and unified rules of expression (CSS) to represent text, audio, video and graphics, which is undoubtedly ideal for developers. Based on a unified standard development environment, the work will certainly be a lot easier. But the challenge of making everything a reality is still huge, and one prominent problem is the lack of tools, and there are very few tools related to HTML5. There is no denying that the popularity of Flash is inextricably linked to the fact that Adobe provides a very useful tool for Flash development.

Link: the evolution of HTML

The full name of HTML is Hypertext markup language (Hypertext Markup Language), which is a specification used to describe web pages. It is these simple tags contained in angle brackets that make up today's Web.

The first official version of HTML was HTML 2.0, launched by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Later, W3C took the place of IETF and became the HTML standard-setting organization. in the second half of the 1990s, the version of HTML was frequently modified until HTML 4.01. at this point, HTML reached its first peak.

The first revision of HTML since HTML 4.01 was XHTML 1.0, where X stands for eXtensible. XHTML 1.0 is based on HTML 4.01 and does not introduce any new tags or attributes. The only difference is syntax. HTML is casual about syntax, while XHTML requires strict syntax like XML. Later, the W3C released XHTML 1.1.

For the W3C, HTML 4 is already perfect, and their next step is XHTML 2.0, hoping to bring Web to the bright future of XML. However, representatives from Opera, Apple and Mozilla are not satisfied with the work of the W3C. They spontaneously organized a hypertext application technology working group, which is WHATWG, and they are committed to the HTML5 specification.

While WHATWG is committed to HTML5, the W3C continues their XHTML 2.0. However, the W3C's work on XHTML 2.0 slowly ran into trouble, then terminated its work on XHTML 2.0 and formed a new HTML working group in 2007, and they wisely chose the results of WHATWG as the basis for the development of HTML5 specifications.

After years of deliberation, the draft of HTML5 was released in 2008, and it is being further improved by the W3C. Right now, there is no clear statement as to when HTML5 will officially become a standard. The good news is that HTML5 may be accepted as a candidate standard in 2012. However, it can be expected that whenever HTML5 becomes a standard, it will be a long-term process for HTML5 to be accepted by all browser providers.

The above is all the contents of this article entitled "HTML5 reshaping the Web World: what changes?" Thank you for reading! I believe we all have a certain understanding, hope to share the content to help you, if you want to learn more knowledge, welcome to follow the industry information channel!

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