OpenTangent

It's been said that the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 has been exaggerated and even abused for marketing purposes . It's certainly true that HTML5 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but it addresses so many obstacles for web development that i believe the impact will warrant the hype. There are some major technological advances such as HTML5 WebSockets and the popular  video and canvas elements but i think the real advantages will come from CSS3 (the style sheet mark-up language that accompanies HTML5). CSS3 will allow designers to make very rich interfaces with relatively little effort and without the need for any third party plugins like Flash. With these two standards specifications in place, web applications rather than  legacy PC applications  (as Google calls them) should become a very viable option. There was another bottle neck for web apps however and that was the inability of web browser's of the time to rend...

As predicted , Google is actively ensuring the openness of the web by open sourcing the VP8 video codec developed by On2 Technologies  which Google bought for $124.6 million .  Ogg Theora was the codec that open source advocates pushed to use as the standard for HTML5 but it was noticibly inferior in performance compared to the proprietary H.264 codec which was backed by Apple and more recently Microsoft. If claims are true that VP8 can save up to 50% bandwidth usage over H.264 then VP8 will be the clear performance champion and since it is going to be open souced and therefore free to be used by anyone and in any browser, H.264 no longer puts up much of a fight. All web browsers and devices will soon have high quality streaming video without the unnecessary royalties.

Steve Jobs has said that Adobe Flash is a dying technology . For the first time ever, i completely agree with him. Many have said that that comment is simply CEO rhetoric which, to be honest i agree with as well. Adobe Flash was accepted early on as the de facto standard for bringing rich media and vector graphics to a text and image based web. Being a Linux fanboy, i'm very familiar with popularity of certain software increasing based on the popularity of that software thereby creating exponential growth through recursive popularity. To translate my developer speak; people tend to favour popular software rather than good software . Flash is an example of this and therefore despite the fact that it is a buggy CPU hog as Steve rightfully points out, it still has a lot of staying power. HTML5 is here to rescue us from a slow, buggy, inflexible and quite frankly, painful Flash filled web experience. Being the influential character that Steve Jo...

Unbeknown to many; a battle has be raging in the world of internet standards. The dispute is around the HTML5 video tag which will remove the need for Adobe's proprietary Flash to display videos online. Currently YouTube uses the H.264 codec to compress their videos which has a very good performance rating but is encumbered by patents. Ogg Theora video compression format on the other hand, is open source and free of proprietary licensing and copyrights, therefore free of royalty obligations. The Problem with Theora is that it does not match the performance of the H.264 codec. Mozilla and Opera have decided that there is no question as to which codec should be the standard since the web is ultimately based on open standards. They have already implemented support for Ogg video and Google has quickly followed suit with their Chrome browser. Chrome however, also supports the H.264 codec putting Google on the fence with this dispute. Apple  is l...