Ok, we agree, only Internet geeks have the potential to get excited by this news title.
Which is why we at Itomic are excited!
This from Wikipedia about HTML5:
HTML5 is currently under development as the next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. The new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears.
This means that websites can and will be designed and built with richer, more immersive and interactive features that would either not be technically possible today, or are possible today but only with the help of 3rd party plug-in software.
At time of writing, it’s not smart for any web company to be designing and developing websites that are heavily dependent on the major Internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera) ‘behaving themselves’ when it comes to the full implementation of HTML5 (and CSS3) specifications. Because they don’t. Yet. The good news is that the software developers behind these browsers all view HTML5 standards as ‘a good thing’ for the web, and are therefore actively working towards getting their browsers to behave. If you’d like to get more insight into which browsers are leading the charge towards 100% compliancy, try this for size:http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus. (if you want to find out lots more about the browser you’re using right now, go here: http://www.findmebyip.com/#target-selector).
Although it’s market penetration continues to dwindle, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (latest version: 8) is currently at the back of the pack in terms of being HTML5 friendly. That said, IE9 isn’t far away, and this major new release will put Internet Explorer right back in the running.
A great example of how Adobe Flash will likely become less dominant is how Youtube is already gearing up to display all videos (and that’s a lot of videos!) when a certain critical mass of Internet users are using HTML5-compliant browsers: http://www.youtube.com/html5
OK, enough geek talk. How about a demonstration? This one we spotted recently, and it blew us away! Play with this a few times and you’ll spot more ‘funky’ things/features each time…
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
But don’t forget! At time of writing you’ll need to be using a browser OTHER than IE8 in order to have the best chance of the full HTML5 experience offered by The Wilderness Downtown website. Also, you MUST have sound on your computer for the full effect. Here are the links:
http://www.google.com/chrome (this is probably you’re best bet, given that it’s a Google-sponsored experiment!)
http://www.getfirefox.net/
http://www.opera.com/download/
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
HTML5 – bring it on!