Wonders of HTML5

With the up-coming of HTML5 (Web Applications 1.0), lots of technologies and browsers specializations are expected to suffer setback since it makes the webpage more "lively" as compared to the HTML 4 specification. Went through an introductory talk by Brad Neuberg (Developer Advocate @ Google) on HTML5 and its key features. I was curious about the hype on HTML5 and in the quest to get a jist of the thing, went on an exploration spree. The key features portrayed in the talk were :

1. Canvas/SVG: Interactive drawing on a web-page is being provided through the SVG tags and Canvas API's (javascript). Interesting features that enables dynamic modification of attributes of a graphics element on the screen are provided by the API.

2. Video: This is a feature that may affect the usage of frameworks that provide for Rich Internet Applications (like MS Silverlight, Sun JavaFX, Adobe Flash, etc.) HTML5 will have tags to embed the video along with provision for controls to play/pause/play-next/play-previous/volume/size, etc. Also, attractive javascript events can be defined on the video through its ID. No need for third party RIA players to play the videos!

3. GeoLocation: API's have been provided to get the location of the web-user and it fetches its data from GPS, IP as well as Mobile providers (Cell phone). Useful in Social Apps, Gaming, etc.  

4. App Cache: Create an application manifest to save the state of a web application onto local machine and later load the app from the cache by invoking an API, all through HTML and javascript, without using third party storage API's like Google Gears, etc. Primarily this assists offline usage of files. This may mean lowering of market value for third party extensions. Google, though already has started providing support for HTML5 and porting apps to support this revolutionary language. 

5. Web Workers: This is something, which will further improvise on what Chrome excels in. The latter spawns a separate process to serve each web request in a tab/browser window. This was to remove the situation wherein traditional browsers hang executing a java-script in background. HTML5 on other hand, supports for execution of javascript in separate thread, so that they don't affect the state of browser. But, these threads won't have access to the elements on page from which they were spawned. They can carry on with function execution and return the result back to the invoking page. This serves to remove the overhead due to separate process creation for each webpage request, and also removes the hanging of browser window due to on-going javascript execution.
Though HTML5 is still in draft phase, the support for the tags and API's are already available in the latest releases of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE! Looks revolutionary, apps have to be re-written to make HTML self-sufficient to render pages and remove dependency on third-party apps to render elements.