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I just got back from the recent Google I/O developer conference and was struck by it’s simplicity. It was short, only two days. It provided great content. It provided great food and snacks. It even had the requisite Wii and Rockband pods and upped the ante with Pool, Foosball and chair massage.
So enough with the format, what was the message? The message was all about the importance of HTML5 and how it was supported by all “modern” browsers. The browser made by the boys in Redmond was not on this “modern” list. I haven’t followed the HTML 5 standard that closely but was surprised along with others with what could be done within the browser without a plugin. Does this mean Adobe should worry about Flash marketshare dropping? Not immediately, but in a couple of years, maybe so. In a nutshell you have some new tags and features to consider:
<canvas> This tag allows you to have pixel level control in the browser and do things such as draw a diagonal line. They even created O3D which allows you to create compelling 3D graphics and use the graphics card, not the CPU.
<video> Now you can embed a video as easy as an image without worrying about plugins or codecs.
Geolocation – Your PC or Laptop can now be as smart as your iPhone and you can choose to share your location with the browser to get location awareness in Maps or other apps.
App Cache and Database - HTML 5 allows you to do some interesting caching and has it’s own SQL Lite DB (very similar to Adobe AIR). This can allow you to cache portions of your app for faster access or to do interesting offline applications in the browser. Google Mail already uses this approach on the iPhone and Android.
Web Workers – An API for running background Javascript so you can do things asynchronously and not slow down the user experience.
The big question of course is when is the HTML5 support going to be broad enough that developers can take advantage of all of this and really exploit it? Google asked that we as developers push that curve and not allow these features to lie dormant for years as was the case with the foundations of AJAX.
My next post will talk more about Google Wave and some other announcements that came out of I/O 2009.
Tags: google, Google I/O, Google Wave, HTML 5, Moscone