HTML5 is Worth Your Time

Though all the features are not close to being 100% cross browser, and while I have only scratched the surface I think HTML5 is real game changer. I certainly am excited thus far with what I see.

Web Storage is a great new feature that is essentially cookies on steriods. Actually comparing it to cookies is a bit of a disservice. In a nutshell web storage is a hash (associative array, aka key/value pairs) that you can store persistent or per session. The most interesting to me is persistent, though this term is a bit of a misnomer as the cache is only persistant until one clears out their browser cache. Session can also be useful for maintaining page to page context where you do not want to make a trip back to the server. In general I think it is still going to be appropriate to maintain session and persistent context server-side, but this really is a nice option for certain development scenarios.

Client Side SQL DB - I have not done anything with this one yet, but it the feature that excites me the most. A client side database you say... what for? Being able to put a database on the client opens up a wealth of possibilities for resident apps. Yes... yes... I know we are entering the age of the cloud (which also is very cool and about time) and 24/7 connectivity, but the possibilites for pc or tablet apps is very thought provoking indeed. Especially coupled with the new file system api's. Think Dropbox on a much broader and grander scale!

I also like the new audio and video tags, though there have are means of doing this for some time.

When you couple HTML5 , CSS3, and killer libraries like JQuery one can really begin to build some wicked apps.

I started working with HTML a month before they implemented tables (seriously). We could only dream back then. Today our only excuse seems to be our own lack of imagination :-). For someone that has been riding the web train since Clinton was President these are some very exciting times to be doing web development.