experience matters

The first draft of the HTML5 specification was released on January 22, 2008, and though it’s an ongoing work, some parts of it are already being implemented in some browsers, such as Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4. Microsoft has started implementing it in IE8.

In his article “Are You Ready for a Flash-Free Future?” on Advertising Age, Garrick Schmitt gives us some links to HTML5 experiments and discusses if the adoption of this technology will happen only with the final recommendation in 2022 or before, at the final draft stage, in 2012. I personally believe that the industry will push this date to even earlier and we’ll start seeing more and more examples in the following months.

But how is HTML5 going to change the way people interact with websites?

To be honest, I believe that, from a non-technical standpoint, people won’t see much difference. Because we already have a lot of rich interactions happening in our websites today, thanks to the use of Flash, Silverlight and Java, the point is: with HTML5, things we are already building with these technologies will be achieved more easily, with less code and less dependencies. That may mean reduction of time, complexity and cost for projects. Some JavaScript libraries, such as JQuery and Prototype, have been playing the role of making web development easier for some time and with great success, and HTML5 applies some of their principles for the sake of productivity.

These are some cool features of HTML5 that will contribute to building good user experience:

- Canvas: It’s a custom drawing area, great for animations or data display. Check out this experiment on Canvas.

- Audio and video: It’s now possible to implement audio or video in websites with less dependency on proprietary players as Flash, Windows Media Player and Quicktime.

- This new possibility may make the presentation of audio and video more flexible in terms of file format (like mp3, wav, avi etc) and less complicated to implement.

- Drag and drop: With a little help of JavaScript, it will be possible to build interesting user-friendly interfaces and forms, where the user will be able to drag elements from a container to the other. Think, for example, of an interface to select services you want to see available in the homepage of your online banking, or the selection of optional equipment in a “build your own car” functionality. See examples and notice how again this can bring the benefit down to the user level.

- Downloadable fonts: It’s not part of the HTML5 specification, but a new CSS feature. Maybe the end of the era of exporting images for headers or anything that’s not written in Arial, Verdana or other default fonts. It allows the user to automatically download the required fonts and see the texts the way designers conceived them.

- Local data storage: It’s now a specification apart from the HML5 one, but also worth to mention. Offline storage is a mechanism to store data in a persistent way in the web browser. It’s an improvement on the use of cookies and will help storing more complex sets of data locally, being a helper on a good number of cases, such as recording user preferences, for example.

The good news is: The future is now. HTML5 is already happening, and as more browsers offer good support to this new wave, it will be possible to build rich interface applications in less time, with less effort and dependencies. Good for developers, clients, and, above all, users.

Last 5 posts by William Bertolo

• CT3: Twitter Goes Multilingual – November 3rd, 2009
• Augmented Reality – July 9th, 2009
• In The Air – May 20th, 2009
• Third Life – April 22nd, 2009
• Rooftop Advertising – A New Trend? – November 3rd, 2008

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