Making Way for HTML 5

In case you haven't heard yet, XHTML is going the wayside in favor of the new standard HTML5. While the pros and cons of XHTML vs HTML5 have been debated back and forth all over the web, the most feverish seems to be around the new video tag.

In a nutshell, the video tag can best be described as:

As evidenced by the various Flash-based media players, authors are interested in providing their own custom-designed user interfaces, which generally allow users to play, pause, stop, seek, and adjust volume. The plan is to provide this functionality in browsers by adding native support for embedding video and audio and providing DOM APIs for scripts to control the playback. — from A List Apart, Preview of HTML5

As the video tag becomes more ubiquitous, the question becomes: how much of a drop in Flash/Silverlight usage will we see on the web? A nail in the Flash coffin? That is precisely what Infoworld is asking.

Most companies involved in the HTML 5 effort are browser developers or rich Internet application tool developers, but not both. The exception is Microsoft, which therefore is in a difficult situation, says Almaer. The company has heavy investments in trying to propel Silverlight to dominance. "That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in. [But] if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?" he asks. — from Inforworld

The front-end world of web development will be pretty interesting to say the least in the coming years.

Posted by in Web Development