Thoughts on HTML5?

[Renegade]

Well, it looks like HTML5 support in browsers is still pretty piss-poor.

http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/

Opera and Chrome seem to shine, but...

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

Yay... 14% there. (Or whatever -- close enough.)

Is it worth bothering with right now?

Would you do a site in HTML5?

Have you used any good cross-browser scripts to help maintain compatibility?

[KynloStephen66515]

Personally, I dont really see the point in HTML5 yet...Its kinda like Flash...everybody wanted it, but nobody loved it enough to add full support in the browsers for it at the beginning of its life.

[40hz]

I think the biggest holdup for faster adoption is that all the big players like Google and Apple and Micrsoft are holding off on better support until they can figure out ways to twist this open standard to their own ends. Apple hopes to use it to kill Flash. Microsoft wants to make it just another extension of their web development product line. Mozilla is hoping to they'll finally figure out a way to make some real money from all this. And Google...well... who knows what Google is up to? Their 'official' story changes almost every other day.

I personally think HTML5 will be the battleground. And HTML6 will be what eventually emerges as the "new" new web coding standard. I'm thinking that will be sometime around 2017.  

[Renegade]

I think the biggest holdup for faster adoption is that all the big players like Google and Apple and Micrsoft are holding off on better support until they can figure out ways to twist this open standard to their own ends. Apple hopes to use it to kill Flash. Microsoft wants to make it just another extension of their web development product line. Mozilla is hoping to they'll finally figure out a way to make some real money from all this. And Google...well... who knows what Google is up to? Their 'official' story changes almost every other day.

I personally think HTML5 will be the battleground. And HTML6 will be what eventually emerges as the "new" new web coding standard. I'm thinking that will be sometime around 2017. 

I think you're bang on there.

But, I'm not sure if HTML6 will be that soon. It will take a few years for HTML5 to reach "adoption" level at this rate.

Looking at some HTML5 specs, I'm not impressed. JavaScript? Jeez... Can we get a compiled language that will run decently? Sigh... Ruby, Python, C#, whatever. Just something better than crappy scripting.

[Stoic Joker]

Did anybody else notice that Safari has much better HTML5 support on Windows than it does on (its native) Mac? I'm not really sure what to read into that. Other than perhaps that Mac is just gum-balling code together for the Windows version so they can work out how and what not to do on their own doorstep.

Save on support headaches by screwing up on somebody else's dime, yeah, that's inovative... Not!

[Renegade]

Did anybody else notice that Safari has much better HTML5 support on Windows than it does on (its native) Mac? I'm not really sure what to read into that. Other than perhaps that Mac is just gum-balling code together for the Windows version so they can work out how and what not to do on their own doorstep.

Save on support headaches by screwing up on somebody else's dime, yeah, that's inovative... Not!

That would make sense.

[rgdot]

Some of this has to do with the end consumer too. I kind of see it as similar to the IPv4 story. The end user doesn't want to care as long as youtube videos work (or in IPv6's case, as long as you can just type youtube.com and go)
This kind of 'as long as it works' attitude doesn't create motivation at the business level.

[Stoic Joker]

Some of this has to do with the end consumer too. I kind of see it as similar to the IPv4 story. The end user doesn't want to care as long as youtube videos work (or in IPv6's case, as long as you can just type youtube.com and go)
This kind of 'as long as it works' attitude doesn't create motivation at the business level.

He's got a point there folks - Not everybody is as picky as we are...

[vlastimil]

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are pushing HTML5. An open and (relatively) powerful standard is in their interest.

Opera is trying, but its small market share makes it irrelevant (sorry to say that) - it is a good software, but they do not have a killer feature that would lead more people to them. Good compatibility is not enough, especially when sites are optimized for other browsers.

Internet Explorer has been successfully (intentionally) slowing down the adoption of new web technologies in the last decade. Powerful web apps are Microsoft's nightmare. Once ordinary users only need a capable internet browser, Windows loses a lot of ground. (Why install Windows on your mom's computer when she only needs it for reading email, video-conferencing, watching news, TV shows and movies, listening to music and playing games like solitaire? And all that can be done in a free HTML5 browser running on a free Linux.)

Microsoft continues to sabotage the progress with IE9 by claiming HTML5 compatibility and calling it a modern browser. They only implemented a tiny bit of HTML5 and are discrediting the HTML5 buzzword. That behavior is completely understandable, it has brought them a lot of money. They were the leader in IE4 times, but left that position to others. Maybe they make a comeback - they had 10 years to address the situation and I kind of do not want to believe that their whole strategy was to delay the adoption of web technologies. We'll see...