Embracing HTML5 and CSS3

The web has never been particularly good at sitting still. Technologies arrive with great fanfare, developers swear eternal allegiance to them, and a few years later we quietly remove the stickers from our laptops and pretend the whole thing never happened.

So far, 2010 looks unlikely to break with tradition. Recently the Web Standards Project announced a change of direction. Hardly shocking. The so-called “war for web standards”, as Aaron Gustafson calls it, isn’t over.

But at least the battlefield has changed. Most serious web developers have accepted that standards compliance is generally a good thing, rather than some exotic lifestyle choice practiced by bearded men arguing about doctypes at conferences.

Last year XHTML2 was finally taken behind the barn and put out of its misery. This cleared the road for HTML5, which, together with CSS3, is starting to make the web a considerably more interesting place.

And some of the experiments are impressive. Take the particle emitter system built using the HTML5 Canvas element. Add JavaScript, which apparently refuses to die and instead keeps escaping into increasingly unexpected parts of civilization, and suddenly the browser starts looking less like a document viewer and more like an application platform. Someone has even produced a JavaScript port of the classic game Another World.

At this point, the people selling proprietary browser technologies might reasonably start checking the exits. Flash and Silverlight aren’t dead, of course. Technologies rarely die when journalists tell them to. They linger around for years, haunting corporate intranets and legacy applications like disgruntled ghosts.

But HTML5 comes with native video support, and that’s another knife aimed squarely at Flash’s comfortable position on the web. Then there’s Apple’s newly announced iPad, which doesn’t support Flash at all. Whether that’s visionary thinking, corporate stubbornness or Steve Jobs simply deciding what everyone else should want is open to debate. Probably a little of each.

Still, before we declare the glorious HTML5 revolution and start burning our Flash manuals in the streets, there’s a small detail worth remembering: the HTML5 specification isn’t scheduled to be finished until 2012.

So yes, the future is coming. Just don’t uninstall everything yet.