The conflict between Adobe and Apple about Flash was a focus event in the first half of this year, which attracted a lot of people's attention. Many people first knew about the existence of HTML5 because of this incident. People who know HTML5 for the first time may be surprised. The HTML5 specification was formulated as early as six years ago. Although the draft HTML5 specification is very good now, it is uncertain when it will really become a standard.
In fact, the work of the HTML5 specification committee is progressing very slowly. Because there are too many ideas about how to improve browsers and improve the Web world, whether it is browser manufacturers or others, and it will take time for these ideas to converge and reach an agreement in the HTML5 specification. Although many new tags and JavaScript functions have been tested in some browsers, interoperability and standardization issues remain unresolved. For example, the HTML5 demos made by Apple are impressive, but they only work well on Safari. That's why Flash supporters deride HTML5 for bringing the Internet back to the era of browser wars in 2000.
Although this ridicule may upset the supporters of HTML5, and the long wait is really hard, it is wrong to ignore HTML5. Because there are not only industry giants behind HTML5, but more importantly, standardization is the inevitable trend of IT technology development. As far as software is concerned, both browsers and related development tools will constantly absorb various technologies around them and finally standardize them, which is the inevitable law of technological development.
To be sure, HTML5 will change all aspects of the Internet. Obviously, it will not completely replace Flash, but it will really reshape the Internet, allowing browsers to do more work without plug-ins, from location tracking to saving data to the cloud. HTML5 tags will replace plug-ins that accomplish simpler tasks, and at least in some cases, it can develop some advanced functions for more users. In the end, it may make the Internet safer, more efficient and more flexible.
So, where will HTML5, which is about to become the new standard, take us? The following is a collection of opinions from developers, programmers and designers, from which we can understand how HTML5 has changed the Internet.
Reduce the importance of plug-ins
In the past, browser plug-ins were very popular in the Web world, because it encouraged innovative ideas and bold experiments. When sounds, animations and other very vivid web pages were first presented on the internet through plug-ins developed by companies such as Sun, Adobe, RealAudio and Microsoft, it was really refreshing. However, the problem soon appeared. The plug-in interface is open to everyone, and everyone is trying to add new functions to the old text-based world. Chaos is inevitable. One of the most famous plug-ins is Flash, and there are countless other similar plug-ins.
For various reasons, Apple banned Adobe's Flash from running on its own platform, which made it impossible for Apple fans to see Flash on the Apple platform. However, the popularity of HTML5 will make this conflict disappear and gradually eliminate those relatively closed development systems: JavaFX may be really powerful, but since JavaScript and Canvas objects can do the same job, why learn another grammar? If video tags can synchronize audio and video, who needs a real ecosystem?
So, will all plug-ins really disappear? Maybe, but it depends on what you want to do. If your goal is only to draw images, then the Canvas object may be enough. But if you want to build a professional 3D world, as seen in complex Flash and Shockwave games, you may have to rely on proprietary plug-in technologies, because these plug-in technologies can directly access video hardware and run 3D games.
Support dynamic image generation
In the past, images displayed in web pages came from directly downloaded GIF or JPG images, but in HTML5, images may not come directly from image files, but are temporarily generated by a Canvas object. A large number of excellent graphic libraries have appeared on the network, which makes it easier to generate images dynamically.
Today, the JavaScript layer can calculate according to the data and then draw a chart. If software developers have enough time and talent, they can make everything on the network more vivid, while the plain text content is less and less. Flash is just the beginning, and the HTML5 environment makes it easier for Web developers to develop complex pictures. Some similar tools have appeared in the market, which will further improve the control ability of Web developers on pictures, and with the maturity of tools, developers will also develop more professional and complex graphics.
One problem that may exist here is that the processing of this image may bring great burden to the client processor, for example, there are certain requirements for the processing ability of the client processor. In the past, some developers were afraid to use Flash plug-ins at all, because rendering and displaying Flash content may bring great pressure to the processor and greatly affect the final experience of users. This should not be a problem in the future. Developers should not let users experience vivid pictures for fear of affecting performance, but should make a compromise choice. Everyone who complains about the impact of Flash on performance should know that it has nothing to do with the technology itself. The problem is that designers use this technology too much to attract our attention.
Allow Web programs to take advantage of local storage
In fact, Web programmers can already store a lot of information by using the local storage space on the browser side. For example, IE allows up to 300 Cookie and up to 4096 bytes of content. However, to develop a truly practical Web program, you may need more storage space than this. For example, the previous Dojo toolkit used Flash plug-ins to allocate some space on the user's hard disk and leave it to the browser. Now it's very simple, and you can achieve the same goal with HTML5.
For this part of storage, programmers can use it at will according to their own needs, such as saving applications and data of cloud services on local hard disks. This also makes the delivery, installation and deployment of cloud applications very similar to traditional applications. For example, whether there is an Internet connection or not, the cloud application can run as usual, because the JavaScript code of the HTML5 application has been downloaded from the server before, and this part of the code is saved locally.
Of course, the application of this technology will not affect the popularity of cloud applications, because the current operation mode is very different from the past, and the local database actually plays the role of intelligent cache. In addition, game developers can store some scene information and equipment information locally, which can avoid downloading these information every time they connect to the computer and save the time of downloading materials. The disadvantage is that these databases are deeply buried in the system folder, and backing up data becomes very complicated. If users want to migrate data from one machine to another, data migration may become more complicated.
Perhaps the emergence of hybrid cloud may solve this problem. Hybrid cloud allows data to be stored in the cloud and on the local computer at the same time, while the local computer just caches the data, and the final version is stored in the cloud, so that it can be accessed from any computer.
Simplify data extraction in Web development
Web developers who extract data from web pages know that the existing HTML structure can hardly provide any meaningful information except telling the browser where the information is. Developers need to know the information of the data itself, which can help programmers understand the true meaning of these data. The so-called microformat in HTML5 introduces a new mechanism, adding some special tags to HTML to help programmers analyze the true meaning of data in tags.
No one can predict how many changes microformats will bring to the network, but it is easy to see that this new mechanism will bring great convenience to programmers and help them develop more efficient Web applications. For example, if there is a good and standard method to represent date and time, programmers don't need to write special code to analyze or guess what time format others may use when developing time-related Web programs for websites. In this way, calendar, timetable, schedule and other applications that need to collect time information from multiple data sources become very simple work.
Support location service
In the online world, in the past, we only knew its IP address, and we didn't know what kind of real world those numbers corresponded to. For example, it used to be almost impossible to know where the computer was, but now location service can solve this problem. In the HTML5 standard, JavaScript is allowed to ask the geographical location of browser users, such as latitude and longitude information. Usually desktop systems do not support this function (because GPS or Wi-Fi is required), but if the terminal is a handheld smartphone, this function can play a role.
Today, no one knows what kind of applications smart programmers will create based on these location information, but one thing is certain, the virtual world will merge with the real world in an unpredictable and incredible way in the future.
Let the network video play more smoothly
The "video" tag in HTML5 makes it easy for Web developers to integrate video content with other content in Web pages, and also allows people engaged in jQuery and PHP development to join the Web development team, so that web development is no longer just the patent of Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX developers.
Although this idea looks attractive, there are still many difficulties, because there is no codec specified in the HTML5 standard, and everyone wants to publish their own video and sound codecs. This means that we replace one confusion with another: it's just that in the past we called the software embedded in the browser a plug-in, but today we call it a codec. Therefore, although we have a standard "video" tag today, the browser may or may not know how to interpret these video contents.
Erich Ocean, a lecturer in HTML5 application development who teaches in Los Angeles, thinks that the codec war continues. "If computer developers and Mozilla think they can set video standards for video professionals, they are all wet." He said, "We see that Google's new video format has been used in some places, such as YouTube, but it will never be as popular as H.264"
Although video playback may face a chaotic situation, because it is impossible for everyone to reach an agreement, the new "video" tag will certainly enrich the video content on the Internet, and web pages will become the main source of video content, while simple text content will become less and less. It's just that this is not necessarily a good thing for children's education, because nowadays children are more and more used to watching cartoons and seldom spend time reading, let alone writing.
Widget will be richer.
Widgets running in IFrame allow web pages to embed the contents of other websites (such as weather forecast), which is very practical and popular. However, for security reasons, these widgets have been running in a relatively independent environment, basically isolated from other content in the web page.
HTML5 provides a standard mechanism for these widgets to communicate with each other. Although they can't enter each other's running environment yet, they can already send information to each other to work together.
Advertisers have been waiting for this for a long time, and they very much hope to integrate banner advertisements scattered in various locations on the same web page. From the development point of view, developers will certainly find other practical uses. For example, the tennis match screen played on the web page can be synchronized with the player information on the left and right sides, which is unimaginable in the era of HTML 1.0.
However, the mechanism of information transmission and mutual communication is only the beginning, and the next problem to be solved urgently is the communication protocol, because there is no standard in this respect so far. Widget developed by two different development teams can communicate with each other only after the standards for transmitting information are set. In other words, both sides need more standard vocabulary.
Improve the security of the browser
Each browser plug-in is an independent application. Different browser plug-ins are developed by different programmers according to different standards, with different release times and different security modes. Of course, some plug-ins are more secure than others. With more and more plug-ins in browsers, it is more and more complicated to track the possible security vulnerabilities in each browser plug-in. For example, it may be difficult for someone to remember whether the security vulnerability of your enterprise at some time at the end of last year was in the plug-in or browser, and whether it was solved by upgrading the browser instead of the plug-in or vice versa.
Putting many functions into HTML5 instead of using plug-ins can greatly reduce security risks, avoid many problems related to plug-in development, and prevent people from intentionally using the API in plug-ins to install malicious code. Because relatively speaking, the security of Firefox, Chrome or IE browsers is usually audited by more people (including the security team). If the security team thinks that a browser is safe, generally speaking, its security risk is definitely much smaller.
However, the safety improvement mentioned here has a certain degree of speculation. There will always be some people in this world who use their intelligence to "do evil", and they may make full use of some features of HTML5 to engage in some malicious acts. It's just that no one can predict what dangers may be hidden in the new features of HTML5.
Simplify Web development
The words of a developer working in a Web software development company are very representative, which concisely expounds the possible changes brought by HTML5. He said: "I prefer HTML5, mainly because it enables me to develop in a unified development environment, that is, browser plus JavaScript plus DOM, without having to switch back and forth between the Flash world and the HTML5 world. In the future, as long as you master a development language and a toolset, you can develop any plug-in. "
He added, "I think the benefits to users are obvious. Now Flash seems to have created another world in the internet world."
Indeed, HTML5 uses a unified language (JavaScript), a unified data model (XML and DOM) and a unified representation rule (CSS) to represent text, audio, video and graphics, which is undoubtedly very ideal for developers. Based on a unified standard development environment, the work will certainly be much simpler. However, the challenge of turning everything into reality remains enormous. A prominent problem is the lack of tools. At present, there are few tools related to HTML5. Undeniably, the popularity of Flash is inseparable from Adobe's very useful tools for Flash development.
Chain connection
Evolution of HTML
The full name of HTML is Hypertext Markup Language, which is a specification used to describe web pages. It is these simple tags contained in angle brackets that make up today's network.
The first official version of HTML is HTML 2.0 released by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Later, W3C replaced IETF as the organization that formulated HTML standards. In the second half of 1990s, the version of HTML was frequently revised until1HTML 4.0 1 in 1999. At this point, HTML reached its first peak.
The first revision after HTML 4.0 1 is XHTML 1.0, where x stands for "extensibility". XHTML 1.0 is based on HTML 4.0 1 and does not introduce any new tags or attributes. The only difference is grammar. HTML is casual about grammar, while XHTML requires strict grammar like XML. Later W3C introduced XHTML 1. 1.
For W3C, HTML 4 has been a great achievement, and their next step is XHTML 2.0, hoping to bring the Web into the bright future of XML. However, representatives from Opera, Apple and Mozilla were not satisfied with W3C's work. They spontaneously organized and set up a working group on hypertext application technology, namely WHATWG, and they devoted themselves to HTML5 specification.
While WHATWG is doing HTML5, W3C is still continuing their XHTML 2.0. However, W3C's work on XHTML 2.0 slowly got into trouble, and then it stopped working on XHTML 2.0. In 2007, a new HTML working group was established. They wisely chose the achievements of WHATWG as the basis and devoted themselves to formulating HTML5 specifications.
After years of brewing, the draft of HTML5 was released in 2008, and W3C is currently improving it. At present, there is no clear statement about when HTML5 will officially become a standard. The good news is that 2012htm5 may be accepted as a candidate standard. However, it can be expected that it will be a long process for HTML5 to be accepted by all browser providers whenever it becomes the standard.
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