If you are asking this question, you don’t get out much. There has been an incredible amount of coverage on this topic in recent months. Let me break it down.
HTML5 is exciting in part because it provides a capability to build an application once and apply it to both desktops and mobile devices.
HTML5 has other powerful features, but this desktop-mobile issue is key. With the fragmentation of browsers and mobile operating systems, this has been a long time coming. Though HTML5 support is becoming a true standard – one which is starting to be implemented widely - it is not yet happening across the board.
The prime outlier today is Microsoft, which in true Microsoft fashion has implemented its own proprietary technology. Perhaps you’ve heard of Silverlight? Even though this is significant, as many corporations have standardized on Internet Explorer (Silverlight’s predecessor), browsers like Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari support HTML5 and can be installed on a Windows desktop.
So why all the press? There can be significant cost savings with HTML5. The developers themselves are less expensive and development time is shorter. There are significant public resources out there for developers too. In the short term it will be interesting to see how Adobe and Microsoft gain/lose market share as the spec is adopted by an ever growing set of browsers.
Tags: Deep Dev, HTML5, Ken Parmelee, Mobile OS
