HTML5 - What's the deal?

HTML5 has been a bit of a buzzword lately, well at least around web development studios. With claims like, "It's going to change the internet" and "The most noticeable breakthrough will improve mobile functionality" it's hard to ignore. But, what is the “buzz” in this buzzword and more importantly, what can we expect from the technology in the digital landscape in the foreseeable future?

What is it?

HTML5 will become the new standard of the good old HTML and XHTML we’ve been using for the last 2 decades. It’s the result of the collaboration between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).

HTML5 is not a new version of HTML, but simply an extension of it. The biggest difference however is that every document element in HTML5 has a corresponding JavaScript API that describes how that element should behave in response to user actions and other events.

These elements offer users a much more rich, interactive experience, without the need of external plugins, like flash for video content. Rendered by the users’ web browser, the implementation of it is not device specific. This is a demand created from the current mobile, tablet and desktop integration we’re seeing today.

New capabilities include page and session-based data storage in the user’s browser, web sockets for inter-application communications, and a drawing environment for creating and manipulating image data.

What can it do?

Knowledge of these technical advances and new features will allow for a more strategic approaches towards digital marketing. Possibly best illustrated in the following examples:

1.The Wilderness Downtown – Arcade Fire
Here some clever Google Earth and HTML5 integration gives the user a personalised music video and puts the user on a journey “back home”.

2. This Shell
This HTML5 experiment promotes Gamit’s new album “Parts”.
By putting all the puzzle “parts” together, the user gets rewarded by a free mp3! After a few goes, I got mine ☺

3. Rumpetroll
Here users can swim and interact as tadpoles in a virtual pool. Thousands of users can access and interact within the same environment with each other. This possibly gives us some insight to what the next generation of twitter will look like?

What does this mean?

Although some might argue that many of these new technological features are only novelties, these websites is undeniably “cool” by savvy web users’ standards. This “cool” factor offers something traditional media can’t, and that is that users really want to interact with your platform.

User acquisition and retention is done organically, instead of like previous methods mostly consisting of media buying. The truth is, users are getting tiered of being bombarded with bigger, more hostile advertising. There’s allot more to be said about that, but for now back to HTML5….

“So, let’s open Dreamweaver and start building HTML5 websites!”, you’re thinking. Not so fast. The biggest problem is browser compatibility. No browser has full HTML5 support. But all major browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer) continue to add new HTML5 features to their latest versions. Even though the digital industry has been paving the way for the last couple of years, HTML5 will only be complete and standardized by 2014.

Only “brave” clients is prepared spend budget on developments that might only be accessible to a few. This will change however, as branding needs’ increase to engage with the audience in newer and more personalised methods.

My guess is that unfortunately it won’t happen that quickly. It’s scary to see how many clients still require their websites to be optimised for IE6! We’ll have to be satisfied for now to only include some HTML5 feature for compliant browsers, but offer an alternative for the non-compliant ones.

We can however get excited, as this is all coming our way!