What do i think about html5?

I don't want to dive too much into technical stuff to keep this post easy to understand.

What is html5 and whats up with it?

html5 is a new standard that the w3c is proposing. W3C is like a turtle when it comes to define new standards and it's understandable why. Tough work!

Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Google are implementing their interpretations of this draft into their browsers. Microsoft is also going to implement it.

Here is where the problem begins. Every interpretation may differ between companies, they may even only implement a subset of the standard, etc.

Microsoft always likes to implement their own truth when it comes to standards.

The most beautiful thing about html5 that seems to have everyone excited about is the "video" html tag.

The video tag will make it possible to inject video into html webpages and have it playback across different browsers that implements html5. Cool, huh?

Here is were the problem begins...

When we talk about video we are talking about codecs. There are a huge amount of codecs out there and everyone thinks theirs is the best.

Google with it's Chrome browser is using an ffmpeg backend and will include a built-in h264 decoder (are they paying for the h264 license?). H264 is an awesome codec!

Mozilla with Firefox is using Theora which is a really cool codec too.

Microsoft with IE will try to use WMV ofcourse which is not as nice as the other ones.

Notice where the problem is?

I can remember the days of Netscape where webpages used to have a footprint that said smth like "best viewed under Windows 95 and IE 5.5". hehe

If the browser doesn't support the video codec you are trying to reproduce it will try to use an external player (like browsers do now with .mov files for example).

So, if you want to reproduce an h264 encoded video injected on the webpage with the video tag you will need:

1) an html5 enabled browser
2) an h264 enabled browser or an extra plugin for playback
3) admin privileges to install software on your computer, which is less and less common on burocratic enterprises

I have worked with runtime browser plugins for years (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) and i know how difficult is to plan your developments across different plugin versions and how much i have fighted with enterprises running a 5 year old plugin without the permission to update.

Adobe's Flash Player plugin weights around 2 MB and a browser weights around 15 MB. It will be even more difficult to keep my users updated. Browsers are starting to have hardware dependencies so that may make the process a little harder.

Will it kill Flash or Silverlight? Could be, but not under this form i think.

We as a company will always offer our clients the best solution for their needs; regardless our likes or dislikes.

I'll try to post a second part to this post soon since there are a lot of details missing.

Thoughts?

--fernando