Endorsements by Apple and Google for the as-yet-unfinished HTML5 have turned this next iteration of the web’s mark-up spec into the buzzword of the moment, and according to blog post from Javascript specialist Ext JS, it is becoming “unhinged from reality”. People are confusing – deliberately or inadvertently – the core spec with a family of related HTML technologies, especially in graphics and video, Ext JS said.
Products’ vice president Michael Mullany wrote Wednesday: “We’re starting to see job postings requiring ‘HTML5 experience’, and people pointing to everything from simple Javascript animations to CSS3 effects as examples of HTML5. “Just as ‘AJAX’ and ‘Web 2.0’ became handy (and widely misused) short-hand for ‘next generation’ web development in the mid 2000s, HTML5 is now becoming the next overloaded term.”
Mullany claimed that a lot of what people think is HTML5 is actually Cascading Style Sheets 3. He called CSS a member of a collection of related HMTL5 technologies that includes Web Workers to run tasks in the background of a browser, Web Storage to store string data in a key-value pair database, and Web Sockets for server communications. The core of HTML5 is less interesting and actually invisible to the end user. The code includes a new content model, accessibility features, and browsing contexts to make HTML cleaner and human readable. “In many cases, it allows what is currently done with styling, Javascript, or server workarounds to be done in HTML,” he wrote.
Ext JS has its own agenda: the company builds and supports a Javascript client-side framework used by Adobe, Amazon, IBM, and others. Mullany also promised Ext JS is planning its own “really useful HTML5 technology web app development” that it will doubtless try to position as something for serious, hype-free development. That said, Mullany and Ext JS have a point. As HTML5 inches painfully towards completion, the actions of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Google have skewed the debate so that video in particular has come to dominate the focus on HTML5.
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