Much has been written about the promise of HTML 5, the next generation of the web’s lingua franca, but so far, despite the potential, there are very few real world websites using the proposed standard. Apple’s recently released Safari 4 beta, however, supports much of the HTML 5 spec, and the demo page for Safari 4 makes heavy use of HTML 5, offering a glimpse of what the web might soon look like.The Safari 4 intro page (link requires Safari 4 beta) uses both the new audio and video tags to embed media and also makes heavy use of CSS 3 for layout, styling and animation.The result is a considerably leaner page than you would see were it written in HTML 4 — gone are the lengthy embed and object tags for video content, and sophisticated animations happen without Flash, JavaScript or other auxiliary tools. And that means the page loads faster and gobbles up less memory in the browser.Unfortunately the Safari 4 intro page also highlights the biggest problem with HTML 5 — so far browser support for HTML 5 tools is limited, and the page only works properly in the Safari 4 beta.HTML 5 represents the biggest leap forward in web standards since the current (4.01) specification, which was completed in September 1999. That’s a good thing, but it also means browsers have quite a bit of work to do before HTML 5 starts appealing to web developers.Opera and Safari have been pioneering HTML 5 support for some time, but Firefox and Google Chrome aren’t quite as far along with their HTML 5 support (although the coming Firefox 3.5 will close the gap considerably). Internet Explorer 8 is somewhat further behind, though it too incorporates a few HTML 5 features.Still, given HTML 5’s lofty ambitions — to bring the web to maturity as a full-fledged application platform, a level playing field where video, sound, images and animations are all standardized — it might be quite a bit longer before we see sites start to adopt the new features.So while the future may not be here just yet, HTML 5 will go along way to simplifying to task of creating sophisticated web pages. In the mean time, novelty pages like Apple’s Safari 4 intro offer a tantalizing glimpse of what the future of the web will look like.Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/03/apple-shows-off/#ixzz0eGq46tSv
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