New web standard HTML 5

HTML 5 is built on HTML the language of the web. Designed at first for creating links from one page of text to another. To create a web of information, HTML has grown much more sophisticated with the introduction of CSS or style sheets. These allow pages to have attractive layout. Another common addition is Javascript which allows page to have lots of interaction.

The internet is maintained as a standard by a group known as a working group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group and the W3C consortium. They standardise the features of HTML which then get integrated into browsers from different companies.

HTML 4 was born in 1999, and HTML 5 was born in 2004, and is still being finalised.

Video

The biggest new bits are video. Today most people watch internet video with a "plug-in" typically Flash or the clunky Real-player, Windows Media Player or Apple's Quicktime. A new entry to the field is Microsoft's Silverlight.

HTML 5 supports a simple new tag "video ..." for embedding a video in a page, just like "img.." for embedding an image, using a video codec in the rendering engine of the browser itself. Most people are looking at MP4 containers for H264 video codec for the video tag to support in the browser, and currently Safari and Chrome support this. The effect is that the movie viewer is less buggy and runs faster.

Storage

HTML 5 supports off-line storage without a plug-in.

Drag and Drop, Document Editing

HTML 5 has a super simple implementation of editable document boxes, drag and drop page elements and drawing surfaces.

Using HTML 5 will bring a better quality, speed and richness to web pages and apps And think, if your document editor is in HTML 5 it will work and look the same on any platform, from the iPhone to a Windows PC.

Could HTML 5 kill Flash?

Could HTML 5 render Adobe's Flash plug-in obsolete? Flash is installed on most computers, but Apple has turned away from it for its iPhone, iPod touch and the new iPad in favour of HTML 5, MP4 and H264. New implementations of web browser rendering engines support full screen video. Apple's Safari is the first browser to fully support HTML 5 and they, together with Google, are strong supporters of web engine developments for this new standard. The other browsers have yet to catch up. Microsoft's browsers may be popular but the are well behind in the implementation of HTML 5.

But HTML 5 itself does not specify the codec for video, the two proposed ones are OGG - an open source free codec, which is notoriously inefficient and a bandwidth hog and so not popular - and MP4/H264 which s standard used from mobile phones through HD TV, but patented and may demand royalties. H264 is a very efficient codec and preferred to save internet bandwidth. Recently the patent owners have said they will licence it free until 2016, but who knows after that, the patent runs out in 2028.

Then there is DRM

Flash supports it, but HTML 5 does not. This is a big problem for media distribution companies as without it movies could be easily saved to your computer and streamed again on the internet. So for the moment, if no DRM, then no TV or Movies from the studios. And it is difficult to imagine everyone getting together to agree on a DRM standard, as each company wants to control their own delivery chain (think iTunes), but we can hope.