HTML 5 has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues as of late and with good reason. Since Apple’s very public trashing of Adobe Flash, not including it in on the iPhone, citing security holes as the main reason along with the fact that Flash is a battery hog, HTML 5 has been tipped as the future of interactive applications on the web.
With a high profile endorsement such as Apple’s, HTML 5 showed up on the mainstream map and sparked the imagination of developers world wide. Interesting new applications began to emerge on the Internet, the most impressive of them all being the video showing a person playing ‘Quake 2’ in their web browser. Other example games are also available on web sites such as Chrome Experiments.
The power of HTML 5 is obvious, and now, another huge push towards getting HTML 5 out there has gathered momentum with YouTube starting an HTML 5 experiment. You can now visit YouTube.com/HTML5 and participate in their beta to launch videos you watch on YouTube in HTML 5 rather than the Flash plugin.
By far the largest video serving web site and in many respects one of the biggest web sites period, YouTube will play a huge hand in the success and/or failure of mainstream HTML 5 adoption. One of the things widely criticized about HTML 5 so far has been its lack of maturity when it comes to video playback. However, it is making major strides in that regard and with the YouTube experiment, we can be sure to see several advances made in this field in the near future.
