TechStuff Looks at HTML5

a little bit about HTML five. Why don't we? Why not? All right then, So, first of all, I would like to tell everyone out there in the listening audience we are currently recording this episode in the afternoon, in the middle of the week. Now, the reason why that's interesting to us is that we normally record on Friday mornings at the end of a long week, but this is

a Tuesday afternoon and I'm feeling a little zany. So okay, but HTML five, So HTML five, before we even get into that, we need to talk about what hypertext markup language is. Yes, Now, this is the stuff that essentially, this language is what helps a web web developer design a web page so that it appears a certain way when you access it with a web browser. It's a very basis of making stuff appear on a web page the right way. And so this dates all the way

back to the early nineties. Do you remember the early nineties? Yes, yeah, what a magical time that was. Huh No, no, you're right, let's move on. So but but in general, this is the stuff that has the tags in it that tell you know, the tag is essentially a message to the web browser saying, when you see this tag, you need to take this action, uh and make whatever comes after that appear a certain way on website. Or it may just be to help lay it out a certain way.

And so, uh, there were a lot of tags that were developed for HTML, and eventually, uh, it got to the point where there needed to be a new implementation of HTML because it was starting to get a little clunky, right, you know, they had a lot of tags there and it was not elegant and confusing for someone who was just trying to start up a website. So there were attempts to make that more streamlined. Yeah, just just for clarification, when we're talking about tags, basically, uh, an HTML document

document is simply a text document um. So it's it's basically your your your letters, your numbers, uh, all those kinds of standard text characters with no formatting whatsoever. In fact,

you're the ones supplying the formatting. If you want something in in bold in the current version of HTML, you would type I want this text in bold, and before that you would type of tag called strong, which is put in between in between brackets, and at the end of the text that you want bold, you would put what they call a clothes tag, which is a slight variant on that, basically to say, I want the following in bold. I wanted to stop here, and it goes

in for that. It could be italic, it could be underlined, it could be struck through or you That's how you put in hyperlinks, that's how you put in images. Is alway these little tags and it's all in uh more or less plain English. You're not doing a lot of calculation like you would in any a typical programming language, like for example, see where you're actually putting in variables

and all that stuff. That's why HTML is is popular for people who are sort of dabbling in the idea of programming because it sort of gives you an idea of what coding is like without a whole lot of coding UM and you and it's very simple to do. It's based on a standard page definition UM, which is maintained by the UH the W three C, the World Old Wide Web Consortium. Yeah, I love that word. Yep, Web's great word. UM an consortium is also awesome. Oh

yeah that too. So yeah, if you were to go and view a web page, if you were to view the source of that web page, uh, the you can look at the source code. It's essentially it's really just a series of directions like what we said, that tell the browser what how to lay that page out. And so it's not software. HTML is not a programming language.

It's a markup language. And what happens is that the companies that make the web browsers have to incorporate the whatever the standard version of HTML happens to be into the web browser so that when you access a website, it uh it it displays that website the right way asterisk asterisk and the asterisk there is that they don't have to nobody's telling them. They have to abide by all the laws, which has been a point of much contention in the past, because UM, there will be a

standard release. There was HTML two and three, and now, as of the time we're recording this in September two thousand twelve, the official recognized version of HTML is HTML four. UM it's it's been updated a couple of times, and people thought that HTML wasn't going to be updated at all anymore, that it was essentially dead. But leave that for a minute. UM. The thing is UM these these specifications.

The browser manufacturers Google for Chrome, UH, Apple for Safari Opera which is a Norwegian company, Microsoft for i E UM Internet Explorer, and and and others. There are many others. UM. They basically have to adopt the guts of this thing. So if you wanted your text to be bold, you can use the old B or you can use the newer strong and they're they're all going to recognize that.

But they're they're usually backwards compatible, so that because if they weren't backwards compatible, any web page that had been does mine with the old tags would be unrecognizable and would not display properly on your screen. So if you need to get your MIDI file fixed, you can still go back to a page from and observe that. Um. But that was the thing for a while, was oh well, filling the name of the company here isn't completely compliant

with the newest standard of HTML. And um, you know, Microsoft went on their own for a while, and um that was it wasn't the kind of thing that the average person would notice. It was more of a tech head thing where they were going, well, you know so and so it was more compatible. Yeah, so the HTML four and also x htmlor UM, which is another type of market language, these languages. Well, HTML four anyway, that was the latest version, the one that everyone is considered

the standard. The current standard was released in a late nineties. Yes, so you've got this uh, this markup language that's over a decade old. And here's the problem. The problem is that the markup language as it was designed back then could not support some of the more rich Internet UH features that we've come to know and love over the years, things like video and audio. Stuff that is a more of a rich experience was not supported in HTML four. Yeah.

As a matter of fact, if you go to UH many popular sites, um, you're going to and view the source as Jonathan suggested a moment ago. You're gonna see HTML, but you're also likely to see other stuff in there too, And you're gonna say, but, Jonathan and Chris, you told me that i'd pretty much be able to read the text file in the back end. What's all this other programming stuff? Well, it could be JavaScript, which popular, which is UH a language, a very mild programming language that

you can use to add some interactivity to websites. And you're also likely to see UH an embed code for FLASH on a lot of interactive media sites. UM and probably just about everybody listening to this US is UH familiar with flash. But it was a technology developed by the UH design software company Macromedia before it merged with Adobe,

UH slash acquired by Adobe, and UM. Basically, UH flash has been the standard for many years for designing rich Internet content, animations, embedding video and things not not YouTube videos or things like that or vino. But you know, special people would produce these things in house and put them on their websites, or they would contract a designer

to put this kind of interactive content on there. A lot of shopping sites like to use it so you can customize your room or things the UM and and so HTML itself doesn't have any way to do that kind of content. Now, you can link to something, you can embed an image, UM or or files on the site, but you might if you click on that file, it might just load in another UM another kind of application, for example UM. So it really didn't support it the way that it could be done if you used flash

for example. Right, So instead what you would have to do is install these plug ins into your browser. So these are plug ins or extensions that would make your browser capable of seeing this kind of information, because again, on their own, they might not necessarily be able to do that. So if you've ever gone to a website and it's prompted you to install a plug in, first of all, be careful, yes, because that's a very common

technique of installing malware onto your computer. If it's if it's a site that you trust, and you feel reasonably sure that there's not any uh hanky nor panky going on at that particular moment, then that might be what you need. You might to install a plug in order to view whatever that content is or interact with that

site in some way. So that was one of the reasons why, uh, there there needed to be this update to HTML was to design a markup language that was backwards compatible so that you could still see those old sites, but also more streamlined again, so that someone who's building something from the ground up starting with HTML five would be able to do so without it being too confusing.

They didn't want the barrier to be too high, and also they wanted to be able to natively support these rich Internet interactions without the requirement of some sort of additional plug in. So this is what kind of prompted companies like Apple in particular to push for HTML five because the uh, the alternative is to support all these plugins, and if there were just one type of plug for each type of rich media kind of experience, maybe that

wouldn't be such a big deal. You know. It would mean that perhaps the browser would be clunkier than it needed to be, but you would have that one solution. But the fact is, there's not just one solution. For a while, there were there were a few different competing technologies that we're all doing the same sort of thing.

But it would mean that, you know, you could be watching video on one site and everything's fine, and then you would go to a different site and suddenly it would prompt you to get a different kind of plug in because the plug and you were using does not work with that particular video. So the two in particular,

I'm thinking of our flash and silver Light. Yes, a silver light came from Microsoft, and uh, anyone who was watching um I remember in the two thousand I think it was a two thousand eight Olympics where if you wanted to watch the stuff online you had to use silver light, at least in the United States, And so U that meant that I installed silver Light on my computer because I wanted to watch some of the stuff.

And and you know, it's it's just not an ideal solution in the sense that you know, you've got a browser that's getting heavier and heavier as far as code is going, because you're plugging in all this stuff. It would be nicer if it were all built in from the ground up and you didn't have to worry about that. So that was one of the reasons for HTMO five. Another was that we're slowly getting closer to this idea of the semantic web, where the web is quote unquote

getting smarter. And what I mean by that is that it's easier for you to access the information you are particularly interested in. So if I'm doing a search for a very specific type of information with the semantic Web, I would ideally get precisely what I needed from that, and not just a bunch of links to things that may or may not have the answer to my question. Uh So, h g mL five has organizational tags in it, things like section or article or side or header that

can help when you're doing a search. It can help identify things that are more important within the confines of that web page than others. So that way, let's say that you're a web page developer and you've used these tags to kind of organize your web page. You've got an entire section that's about the search terms that I'm

looking for. It's more likely that that's going to come up for me when I'm using some sort of search tool, because you have laid it out in such a way that the search engine knows, hey, this is a section that directly pertains to the search terms that were entered. Um, so those were that's also another consideration. So HTML five has really had a big push, particularly from companies like Apple, over the last well several years, actually UH, and that has been the battle cry for a lot of these

companies that HTML five is the future. You should stop developing for things like flash and other plug ins because that's just holding us back. Instead, put your energy toward getting the HTML five to a complete standard, because as it stands now, it's still being developed. Yeah, the UH HTML five, for all of its uh prominence in the tech news in the last couple of years, UM, you

you would think that it was fairly new. But an organization called what would well Okay, that's my best guess on how to pronounce it, w h A t w G. That's the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Basically, it's a group of companies or organizations that decided to UH put their efforts together and update HTML. The idea is, UH, you know, or behind it was, hey, we don't you know, HTML by itself can't do what we wanted to do, what we want to be able to make available to

our customers. So let's see if we can come up with a new standard. And back in two thousand four, UM, Apple Mozilla, which is the organization behind the Firefox browser and opera software UM got together and said, let's UH, you know, we're we don't really like this extensible h t m L x HTML that W three C is working on. Let's see if we can come up with something we like better and then we'll present it um And so for a while, X HTML and HTML five were competing standards, with x t X h t m

L in the lead. It looks like that was going to be the successor to h t m L four. I think what eventually forced HTML five into prominence was the uh that this was on the pre post PC era. But now now that we're talking about tablets, so the pre post PC era, that might just be the PC

RU stop messing with my head. Uh No. I said that on purpose to see if you're I was listening or if I was just so uh so, yeah, I mean this is this is one of those things where they said, okay, let's see what what we can come up with. And so HTML five again isn't it hasn't been ratified, it hasn't been standardized, but uh, it was forced into the media when the I think when the iPad came out in two thousand ten, because basically Apple

bet on HTML five. Now it's one of the members, one of the founding members of what would So you would say, well, okay, sure they're promoting their own standard. Um Apple's argument and leaving flash off the iPad and the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Um It's basically, look, flash can be a resource hog. It takes a lot of processing power to run this. It's gonna slow you down. You're on, on on using these gadgets, and we're just

not gonna put flash on this. Also, it was going to drain your battery because it was such a it was taking up so many resources, which in turn required more power that you would end up having a mobile device that would have a useful battery life of a few hours, which you know is not acceptable if you're looking for something like a mobile phone. I mean, most of us don't plug our phones in every couple of hours to recharge, and if we had to, I think

most of us would be dissatisfied with that experience. Yeah. Now, of course, uh, the the iPhone and iPod Touch predate the iPad, and it was apparent that flash was not going on those anytime soon. But I think the iPad really, the launch of the iPad really brought it into relief. They said Hey, if you got a device this big, if you can look at web pages on this thing, it's intended for surfing in part, why wouldn't you include flash? Come on, Steve, But he said, nope, I'm not going

to do it. Apple is not going to do it. You're on your own. And some other big companies have really, uh at least at least capitulated to that sort of view, if not like wholeheartedly thrown in, some of them have have have started to to acquiesce to to say, all right, you know the writings on the wall, this this has to change. And there's so much momentum going forward that we're going to back HTML five even if we're not going to champion it. Um, there there are a lot

of examples out there. I mean, heck, YouTube has has an opt in service where you can view the videos via HTML five as opposed to flash based players. So that was a big That was a big thing. I mean, you think about how many videos are up on YouTube. That's a massive undertaking. Yeah, yeah, that was that. That actually is a good point because, um, you couldn't go to YouTube and view videos on the iPad when it

first came out, because it was flash based players. Yeah, and uh that that's one of the reasons that they've that Apple has had that YouTube app that it recently did away with from iOS six. There was a native app on iOS that would allow you to access certain YouTube videos that that we're compatible with that app, So that would that was sort of Apple's answer and Google's answer, uh in the short term, while there was this initiative to try and convert videos from flash based to HTML

five based videos. So um so yeah, I mean that this is when people started going, well, or you know, which side are you on? Are you on the HTML five side or are you on the flash side? Come on? Flashes is lovely. It does all the things we needed

to do. There are so many flash games. Um. Facebook was one of those companies in particular that was sort of um, I think, uh sort of a battleground if you will, because so much traffic on Facebook uh involves rich media content, especially the games and other applications that that people run on there. So um and of course

Facebook having uh you know, a billion people more or less. Uh, that's a whole lot of web traffic and and and organizations like YouTube and Facebook are going to be the places where they're sort of litmus tests for the rest of the web. You know, do you have rich media content?

If so, how are you displaying it? So yeah, YouTube chose to make its pages render in HTML five, So pointing Facebook, going back to Facebook, Facebook, this is an interesting and somewhat I don't know if controversial is the right word for it, but there are people have there have been arguments that have broken out online about what Mark Zuckerberg said in September two twelve about face Facebook

and HTML five. He actually said, essentially, our biggest mistake was betting too much on h GML five and this I read this originally in tech crunch Um. But the

the problem was that they Facebook had a choice. They could either develop apps for HTML five, thinking well, this is the ideal situation, because if this is the standard, then everyone is going to incorporate HTML five in their products, which means we don't have to sit there and create a native application for each operating system that's on a mobile device. Is primarily for mobile here that we're talking about.

So they thought, all right, let's throw let's throw all we have into HTML five and start developing for it. But then they discovered a problem and the problem is that ht mm L five is not fully baked and the implementation of it in hardware is not fully baked, so it's not They were discovering that the the experience that users were having on HTML i've based apps on these devices was not ideal. That things were slow, certain features weren't weren't supported through HTML five UM, and it

just was it was not a great experience. And so people were like, this app is terrible, and people were reviewing apps saying, this app is awful because it takes forever considering what I'm asking it to do. I can't believe it takes so long for me to accomplish these goals.

And so that was one of the issues. And then they said, well, if we had instead spent all that time and energy and thought on designing native applications for these devices, they could take advantage of each devices UH hardware capabilities and UH and their operating systems in a way that would be a much more satisfying experience for the user. Even though that means that we are contributing

to this sort of fragmented approach to developing apps. And you know, this was a big This caused a lot of Uh, it was a bit of a kerfuffle that fall fell out about this, and I think part of the problem is that HTML five is a little too It's it's not ready for prime time yet, and that the hardware and the the hardware is not really there

to support it. The markup language is not mature enough yet, the implementation of it is not mature enough yet, so the experience is not, uh, not going to be great across the board, particularly in the mobile world, and that perhaps a couple of years down the line, HTML five will be the obvious answer, right but right now it's not. And the problem is Facebook jumped on it a little too early. Yeah, and people, of course, uh initially when that comment came out, I think it it caused the

sturb because it was pretty strongly worded. I've seen several commentaries and said, well, you know, it's probably not their biggest mistake ever. Um, but yeah, I mean it's so it's so hard to tell at this point what is and what isn't going to be in the final implementation of HTML five. But development has been steady on it since it's been announced and adopted by so many companies. So um, yeah, I think betting the farm on it or betting the farmville. I see what you did there,

Uh might might be a bit extreme. Uh yeah, there there There have been some HTML five games and things that I've seen pop up on Facebook. The majority of them are still baked in flash. UM. But yeah, I mean even even Adobe whose product flash is um has been backing off to some degree. I mean even even h Flash for Android has been discontinued officially UM. And and and it appears that they have gone into the business of building HTML five encoding tools, which uh, you know

would seem to be the smart move. So yeah. Uh. The thing is that it also goes into the whole is it the web or is it mobile app? See that's a That's another interesting point is that when the when the when HTML five, when they were starting to develop it for HTML five, that was pre mobile, I mean, before smartphones had really hit the consumer market, before tablets had really hit the consumer market. You're talking about, you know, the original When first looking into HTML five, you're almost

looking at two different branches of the web. Because there's the computer experience, which you know, a lot of us are familiar with because that's how we learned to use the web that was that was the way the main way to use the web, and now mobile is increasingly taking that over and becoming the dominant way that a lot of people are rely upon in order to access

the web. So it means that while while the considerations you made for this markup language might have made perfect sense for a desktop or laptop computer that has access to greater resources than your typical mobile device does, now you have to rethink all that again because you're talking about, uh, you know, the mobile approach, and it's not necessarily the people behind HTML five that have to do the rethinking.

It's the hardware developers and the operating system developers who have to really consider how to implement this in a way that fits in the mobile world. And remember the mobile world, you've got several challenges battery life, like we mentioned as a challenge limited resources because in general, you tend to have lower powered chips because lower powered chips are going to drain a battery more slowly, and they generate less heat, which is important for a mobile device.

And you're going to have a different form factor. So all of those things play into designing the operating system and its capabilities and features. In a mobile platform as well as you know, how do we implement this HTML five, what's it going to look like in the mobile space, how's it going to behave, how's it going to access the resources we have when we try to render a web page that is um that has been built through

HTML five. So it's it's you know, it's not a simple answer, because it's not oh well, you just need to change this one aspect of HTML five and everything works perfectly. No, it's it's more of that relationship of operating system to hardware where there's going to be a bit of a bottleneck, at least in the short term. It may very well be that in a year or two years will have some breakthroughs where the because of architecture or because of operating system design, that no longer

becomes a real issue. And HTML five is the obvious answer. But for right now, that native app approach looks like that makes more sense, at least for Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, you know, as Matta say said, you know, it's also in the implementation too. It's not just the h t m L five, it's the way it was rolled out. I'm sure once they've had an opportunity to you to retreat and regather uh their resources that you

know that will be able to do that. But you know, it does affect so many people that you know, building you know, building any architecture. We've talked about the many times that there have been redesigns and outcries and whatnot. Sure, so yes, there's at least a brew haha if not a kerfuffle. Yes, yes, I would agree there is at least a brew haha, which as you know, is three brooms short of a kerfuffle, but six brooms more than shenanigans. So um yeah, it's uh, it'll be interesting to see

how this develops. I'm sure we will continue to see developments in HTML five as well as its implementation. Uh and and like I said, maybe a couple of years down the road, that will be what everyone develops in because it saves so much time to do it through HTML five as opposed to designing native apps for you know, however,

many operating systems are out there. Granted, it may very well be that the operating systems that are out there boiled down to uh you know, Windows eight, iOS and and Android, but you never know, we could still see one of the other operating systems rise up, or even a new one take takes center stage. I mean, no one thought that palm would go anywhere when it oh wait yeah, um yeah, and and that that's that's a

good point too. I mean that, uhh, this is this is one of those things that I think will will play itself out in in the standards simply because, uh, it will be more universal and give people an easier and more enjoyable experience once assuming that it does get adopted. Yeah, it looks like from most what I've seen most recently we're talking about as far as an actual standard is adopted, at least that's the proposed date at this point, so

it's it's still a couple of years off. Yeah. And the nice thing is that when you think about one of the nice things about this is is when you get to a point where HTML five becomes the basis

for most apps, or at least a good selection of them. Uh, the nice thing about that is you can sit there and get to a point where you know that the app version of a particular thing, or the app on your smartphone is going to work more or less the same way as the app on someone else's smartphone, even if they have two different operating systems, which is kind of nice because right now that is not the case.

There are so many apps out there that have dramatically different sets of features from one operating system to another, because one of them may support something natively and one may not, or because maybe one company has a huge amount of horsepower on their mobile device but only allows their own apps to have access to that power, and no one else's apps can access that power. I'm not naming names, Okay, I just don't own one of those, um anyway, I'm kidding. I actually do own one desk

right now. All right, So we're going to wrap this up. This was, you know, really again we're looking at this whole Facebook HTML five mistake. I think even Zuckerberg would say, yeah, it was just too early to make that move. It wasn't necessarily that it's the wrong move in the long run. It's definitely the wrong move when they made it, so, I don't know, yeah, biggest mistake, that's arguable. There have been people who said, what about launching that I p

oh so quickly. Of course they were really pressured to do that. There wasn't a whole lot of choice in that either. But although they could have anyway, that's a totally different podcast which I think I think we've actually recorded it. So um. You guys, if you have any suggestions for upcoming episodes of tech Stuff, something that you want to know way more about, you should definitely drop us a line let us know. We'll be happy to

talk about it in a future episode. You can get in touch with us over email our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or let us know on Facebook or Twitter or handle at both of those locations as tech Stuff, H. S W and Tris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has staff works dot com