If you think on how the web evolved in recent years it is hard to imagine that your current website run on some technologies that are more than 10 years old.
Since the 90’s era the web has fundamentally changed, there is more and more applications, like Facebook, that run exclusively on the web.
This has brought new needs and challenges, and HTML5 and CSS3 are coming in to give better tools to web developers empowering them to create better and stronger website.
What has changed?
A lot. You know all the cool graphic elements the web 2.0 trend has given us, like rounded corners, gradients and shadows? Well for now, this is all done with images. CSS3 is coming to change the way web developers work with designers. And this is more important than you would think, it is hard to imagine that such, now standard, styles are hard to implement. But don’t forget that we still have to deal with an old and reckless Internet Explorer 6 that still lingers on the web!
All those beautiful images are also demanding more bandwidth and loading time. People want their websites to load fast, if not instantaneously. It is understandable, and CSS3 will bring some help along the way to make your website faster. Overall CSS3 will make it easier for web developers to create and maintain nice graphic elements.
With HTML5, it is more a fundamental change in your website structure that is happening,
It empowers web developers to create more complex applications and alleviate the maintaining cost of these tools. For example, there will be an audio and video tag, which means that the use of Flash will not be necessary anymore for listening to videos! Draggable content will be native, we will have a graphic api (a bit like flash), evolved cookies and much, much more.
Mozilla even recently demonstrated multi-touch screen events thats enable you of controlling your browser with your fingers!
But when?!
Unfortunately this might happen later than sooner. These specifications take a long time to write. This is an open specification,
everyone can participate to the discussion, even you. While of course this is good thing! you can understand how a mess this can create.
But some companies are stepping up like Mozilla and Opera, and are implementing parts of the specifications right now.
And indeed, the shadows and rounded corners are implemented in every browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer.
You can understand how it can make web developers outcry and put us in an unfortunate position
as Microsoft has still roughly 67% of the browsing market.
There is a light in the end
The competition is fierce in the browser market, Internet Explorer is losing a small percentage of it’s market shares every month.
It certainly rings a bell in the Microsoft office, and there is hope that IE9 will bring us a bunch of cool stuff. In the end Microsoft will need to become competitive and implement these technologies, and for you and me, the sooner the better. The future is bright in the WWW and be sure that at w.illi.am we are watching the web community to bring you the best technology possible.
