Gary Robson from North East digital company Industrial Strength, outlined some of the possibilities and difficulties of using HTML5 from a web developer’s point of view.

“We haven’t really used it in any of our projects yet because the browser support simply isn’t wide enough yet (usually down to Internet Explorer)”, he said.

“One of the frustrations of web development is that we usually end up standardising on yesterday’s technology in order to ensure a wide potential userbase and that we aren’t cutting off a large share of possible site visitors to a clients site through compatibility.”

According to Gary, the new version of HTML5 is, from a technical stand point, “just more of the same” in comparison to its predecessors.

“It doesn’t require any new skillsets and doesn’t make any huge conceptual leaps. Most of what it provides are standardised solutions to problems that web developers and designers have been working around for a long time.

Some of the new features:

Descriptive tags to contribute to the ‘rise of the semantic web’
“An important step in serving content to multiple form factors (desktop, mobile etc), but also aid SEO by letting us use a consistent and standardised vocabulary to tell Google & Co which areas of a page are important and warrant indexing.”

Multimedia support (at least in theory)
“The introduction of Audio & Video tags mean that we now have a plugin-free method of including a/v content in web pages. There are still a number of drawbacks to HTML5 video, notably the lack on consensus regarding video codecs.”

Offline storage
“Not widely supported yet, but offline storage allows data to be stored offline so that it can be retrieved even if the user has no internet connection. Google makes good use of this to allow you to store all your gmail emails offline with a compatible browser and is also starting to use it in their Google Docs suite of apps.”

Canvas tag
“The canvas tag gives us a 2D drawing surface that we can draw to at runtime using javascript. This, along with the video tag, are the reasons why so many people are touting it as a flash killer.”

HTML5 vs. Flash

Gary also lists some of the pros & cons of HTML5 and Flash, while noting that the release of Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 will inevitably change things again.

Pro for HTML5

1) It’s an open standard that isn’t reliant on a single vendor (Adobe) to bless any new platforms with a plugin before it’s usable.
2) As a developer who uses javascript every day, I don’t have to learn and keep up to date with yet another language (ActionScript 3) in order to product rich interactive content.
3) It’s free to use, whereas Adobe’s Flash creation apps cost a lot (it is possible to create flash without paying Adobe, most of the stuff I do is done without the help of Adobe’s apps, but you loose a number of the benefits of using Flash that make it a good platform for non-developers).
4) A big plus for OSX users is that it doesn’t use Adobe’s notoriously bad Flash plugin for Mac. The reasons why its so bad is down to yet another competition between Adobe & Apple, but whatever the reason, Flash on OSX is horrible.
5) It works on Apple mobile devices.

Cons for HTML5

1) Current implementations are generally slower than Flash when producing the same results.
2) Flash currently has a richer set of drawing tools available to developers.
3) A very personal one, but I find ActionScript3 a much better language to develop large scale apps in when compared to Javascript.
4) This is a obvious one, and only really an issue because of its immaturity, but when compared to Flash, the number of re-usable third party libraries for HTML5/Javascript is very small.  Actionscript 3 has a number of mature libraries and frameworks.
5) Again, down to immaturity, but when compared to Flash’s 99.7% availability on the desktop (and a growing footprint on mobile platforms, Apple excluded) HTML5 is just too small a target to develop for right now.

Feature article

The latest development in the HTML5 vs. Flash debate was YouTube rewriting its mobile site entirely in HTML5 – after criticising it in their official blog. This was happy news for iPhone and iPad users, but the rest of us are confused. Who’s in the right and what’s the future of these web technologies? Read more…

Is HTML5 ready to take over multimedia content on the web?