HTML5 Reshapes the Web World How Will It Change the Internet_html5 Tutorial Tips

　Will HTML5 reshape the Web world?

A major incident in the first half of 2010 attracted the attention of many people, many of whom learned about the existence of HTML5 for the first time because of this incident. People who are learning about HTML5 for the first time may be very surprised. The HTML5 specification was formulated as early as 6 years ago. Although the draft specification of HTML5 is already very good, it is still uncertain when it will actually become a standard.

Indeed, the work of the HTML5 specification development committee is progressing very slowly. Because there are so many ideas from browser vendors and others about how to improve browsers and improve the Web world, and it takes time for these to be brought together and agreed upon in the HTML5 specification. Although many new tags and JavaScript functions have been experimented with on some browsers, interoperability and standardization issues have not yet been resolved. For example, while Apple's HTML5 demos are impressive, they only work well on Safari. That's why Flash proponents deride HTML5 as taking the Web back to the browser wars of 2000.

Although this kind of ridicule may make HTML5 supporters sad, and the long wait is indeed difficult, it is wrong to ignore HTML5. Because behind HTML5 is not only the promotion of industry giants, but more importantly, standardization is an inevitable trend in the development of IT technology. As far as software is concerned, whether it is browsers or related development tools, they will continue to absorb various surrounding technologies and finally standardize them. This is an inevitable law of technological development.

To be sure, HTML5 will change all aspects of the Internet. Obviously it will not completely replace Flash, but HTML5 will indeed reshape the Internet, allowing browsers to do more work without the help of plug-ins, from location tracking to Data is saved to the cloud. HTML5 tags will replace plug-ins that perform simpler tasks, and at least some of the time, it can develop advanced functions to more users. Ultimately it could make the Internet more secure, more efficient, and more flexible.

So, where will HTML5, which is about to become the new standard, take us? Here are some opinions from developers, programmers, and designers, from which you can learn how HTML5 is changing the Internet.

　 Reduce the importance of plug-ins

In the past, the Web world was very welcoming of browser plug-ins, because it encouraged innovative ideas and bold experiments, and sounds, animations and other very vivid web pages were developed through Sun, Adobe, RealAudio, Microsoft and other companies. The developed plug-in is indeed refreshing when it is presented on the Internet for the first time. Problems soon arose, however. The plug-in interface was open to everyone, and everyone was trying to add new functionality to the old, text-based world. Chaos was inevitable. The most famous plug-in is Flash, and there are countless other similar plug-ins.

For various reasons, Apple prohibits Adobe’s Flash from running on its own platform, which prevents the majority of Apple fans from seeing Flash on the Apple platform. The popularity of HTML5 will make this conflict no longer happen. Relatively closed development systems will be phased out: JavaFX may be really powerful, but why learn another syntax when JavaScript and Canvas objects can do the same job? If the video tag can synchronize audio and video, who needs Real's ecosystem?

So, will all plug-ins really disappear? Maybe, but it depends on what you want to do. If your goal is just to draw an image, a Canvas object may be enough. But if you want to build a professional 3D world, as seen in complex Flash and Shockwave games, you may also have to rely on proprietary plug-in technology, because these plug-in technology can directly access the video hardware to run the 3D game .

　Support dynamically generated images

In the past, images displayed on web pages came from directly downloaded GIF or JPG images, but in HTML5, images may not come directly from image files, but are temporarily generated by a Canvas (canvas) object. A large number of very good graphics libraries have appeared on the Internet, and the existence of these graphics libraries makes it easier to dynamically generate images.

Today, the JavaScript layer can perform calculations based on data and then draw graphics. If software developers have enough time and talent, they can make everything on the Internet more vivid and reduce the amount of plain text content. Flash is just the beginning, and the HTML5 environment makes it easier for Web developers to develop complex images. Some similar tools have emerged on the market, which will further improve Web developers' ability to control images, and as the tools mature, developers will also develop more and more professional complex graphics.

One possible problem here is that this kind of image processing may put a lot of burden on the client processor, such as certain requirements on the client's processor processing capabilities. In the past, some developers did not dare to use Flash plug-ins at all, because rendering and displaying Flash content might put a lot of pressure on the processor and greatly affect the user's final experience. This shouldn't be a problem in the future, and developers shouldn't deny users vivid graphics for fear of affecting performance, but developers should make a compromise. Everyone who complains about Flash's impact on performance should know that it has nothing to do with the technology itself. The problem is with designers using it too much in order to grab our attention.

　Allow web programs to utilize local storage

Web programmers have actually been able to use the local storage space on the browser to store a lot of information. For example, IE allows up to 300 cookies and stores up to 4096 bytes of content. However, to develop truly useful Web programs, you may need more storage space than this. For example, the previous Dojo toolkit used Flash plug-ins to allocate part of the space on the user's hard drive and leave it for the browser to use, but now it is very simple and the same purpose can be achieved using HTML5.

Programmers can use this part of storage according to their own needs, such as saving cloud service applications and data on local hard drives. This also makes the delivery, installation and deployment of cloud applications very much like traditional applications. For example, cloud applications can run as usual regardless of whether there is an Internet connection, because the JavaScript code of the HTML5 application has been downloaded from the server before, and this part of the code is saved locally.

Of course, the application of this technology will not affect the popularity of cloud applications, because the current operating mode is very different from the past, and the local database actually plays the role of intelligent caching. In addition, game developers can store some situation information and equipment information locally, which avoids having to download this information every time the computer is connected and saves the time of downloading data. The downside is that these databases are buried deep in system folders, making data backup very complicated. If users want to migrate data from one machine to another, the data migration work may become more complicated.

Perhaps the emergence of hybrid cloud may solve this problem. Hybrid cloud allows data to be saved in both the cloud and locally, while the local computer only caches the data, and the final version is saved in the cloud, so that it can be accessed from any computer. .

　Simplifying data extraction in web development

Web developers who have ever extracted data from web pages know that the existing HTML structure can hardly provide any meaningful information other than telling the browser where the information is. Developers need to know information about the data itself that can help programmers understand what the data really means. The so-called microformat in HTML5 introduces a new mechanism, which adds some new special tags to HTML, which can help programmers analyze the true meaning of the data in the tags.

No one can predict how much change microformats will bring to the network, but it is easy to see that this new mechanism will bring great convenience to programmers and help programmers develop more efficient Web applications. For example, if there is a good, standard way to represent date and time, then when programmers develop time-related Web programs for websites, they do not need to write additional special code to analyze or guess what time format others may use. . In this way, applications such as calendars, schedules, and schedules that need to collect time information from multiple data sources will become a very simple task.

　Support location services

In the Web world, in the past we only knew its IP address. We had no idea what kind of real world those numbers corresponded to. For example, it was almost impossible to know where a certain computer was in the past, but now the location services can solve this problem. The HTML5 standard allows JavaScript to ask the browser user's geographical location, such as latitude and longitude information. Usually desktop systems do not support this feature (because it requires GPS or Wi-Fi), but if the terminal is a handheld smartphone, this feature can come into play.

Today, no one knows what applications smart programmers will create based on this location information, but one thing is certain, the future will definitely combine the virtual world with reality in an unpredictable and incredible way. The world comes together.

　Make Web video playback smoother

The video tag in HTML5 allows web developers to easily integrate video content with other content on the web page. It also allows those who are engaged in jQuery and PHP development to join the web development team, making web development no longer necessary. Only for Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX developers.

Although this idea seems tempting, there are still many difficulties because there are no codecs specified in the HTML5 standard, and everyone wants to publish their own video and sound codecs. What this means is that we're replacing one confusion with another: it's just that in the past we called the software embedded in the browser a plug-in, today we call it a codec. So today we have a standard video tag, but the browser may or may not know how to interpret the video content.

Erich Ocean, an HTML5 application development instructor who teaches in Los Angeles, believes that the codec war is still going on. Computer developers and the Mozilla organization are sadly mistaken if they think they can create video standards for video professionals. He said we'll see Google's new video format being used in some places, such as on YouTube, but it will never be as ubiquitous as H.264.

Although video playback may face a chaotic situation because everyone cannot reach an agreement, the new video tag will definitely make the Internet video content richer and richer. The web page will become the main publishing source of video content, while at the same time simply There will be less and less text content. It’s just that this may not be a good thing for children’s education, because today’s children are becoming more and more accustomed to watching animations and rarely spend time reading, let alone writing.

Widgets will be richer

Widgets running in iframes allow web pages to embed content from other websites (such as weather forecasts), which is very practical and very popular. However, due to security reasons, these Widgets have always been running in a relatively independent environment. , largely isolated from other content on the web page.

HTML5 provides a standard mechanism for these Widgets to communicate with each other. Although they still cannot enter each other's operating environment, they can already send messages to each other to work together.

Advertisers have been waiting for this for a long time. They very much hope to integrate banner ads scattered in various locations on the same web page. From a development perspective, developers will definitely find other practical uses. For example, the tennis match screen played on the Web page can be synchronized with the player information on the left and right sides, which was unimaginable in the HTML 1.0 era.

However, the ability to send information and communicate with each other is just the beginning. The next issue that needs to be solved is the communication protocol problem, because there is no standard in this area yet. Only by establishing a standard for transmitting information can it be possible for Widgets developed by two different development teams to communicate with each other. In other words, both communicating parties need more standard vocabulary.

　Improve browser security

Each browser plug-in is a separate application. Different browser plug-ins are developed by different programmers according to different standards, are released at different times, and have different security models. Naturally, some plugins will be more secure than others. As there are more and more plug-ins in browsers, it becomes increasingly complex to track possible security vulnerabilities in each browser plug-in. For example, it may be difficult for someone to remember clearly whether a security vulnerability in your company at the end of last year was caused by a plug-in or a browser, and whether it was finally solved by upgrading the browser instead of upgrading the plug-in or vice versa.

Building many functions into HTML5 instead of using plug-ins can greatly reduce security risks, avoid problems in multiple aspects related to plug-in development, and prevent someone from deliberately using the API in the plug-in to install malicious code. Because relatively speaking, the security of Firefox, Chrome or IE browsers are usually audited by more people (including the security team). If the security team believes that a certain browser is safe, generally speaking, its security risks must be higher. Much less.

However, the improvements in security mentioned here are largely speculative. There will always be some people in this world who use their ingenuity for evil purposes, and they may take advantage of certain features of HTML5 to engage in malicious behavior. It's just that no one can predict what dangers may be hidden in the new features of HTML5.

　Simplifying Web Development

The words of a developer working in a web software development company are very representative. It succinctly explains the changes that HTML5 may bring. He said: I prefer HTML5, mainly because it allows me to develop in a unified development environment, which is the browser plus JavaScript plus DOM, without having to switch back and forth between the Flash world and the HTML5 world. . In the future, as long as you master a development language and a tool set, you can develop any plug-in.

He added, I think the benefits for users are also obvious, and now Flash seems to have created a new world in the Internet world.

Indeed, HTML5 uses a unified language (JavaScript), a unified data model (XML and DOM) and a unified presentation rule (CSS) to represent text, audio, video and graphics. For developers, it is undoubtedly It is very ideal. Based on a unified standard development environment, the work will definitely be much simpler. But the challenge of making everything become a reality is still huge. One outstanding problem is the lack of tools. There are still very few HTML5-related tools. It is undeniable that the popularity of Flash is inseparable from the very easy-to-use tools provided by Adobe for Flash development.

　Link: The evolution of HTML

The full name of HTML is Hypertext Markup Language, which is a specification used to describe web pages. It's these simple tags enclosed in angle brackets that make up today's Web.

The first official version of HTML was HTML 2.0 launched by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Later, W3C replaced the role of IETF and became the organization for setting HTML standards. In the second half of the 1990s, the version of HTML was frequently revised until HTML 4.01 in 1999. At this point, HTML reached its first peak. .

　The first revised version of HTML after HTML 4.01 is XHTML 1.0, where X stands for eXtensible. XHTML 1.0 is based on HTML 4.01 and does not introduce any new tags or attributes. The only difference is the syntax. HTML is more casual about syntax, while XHTML requires XML-like strict syntax. Later, W3C launched XHTML 1.1.

For W3C, HTML 4 is already a success. Their next step is XHTML 2.0, hoping to bring the Web to the bright future of XML. However, representatives from Opera, Apple, and Mozilla were dissatisfied with the work of the W3C. They voluntarily organized and established the Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, which is the WHATWG, and they are committed to the HTML5 specification.

While the WHATWG works on HTML5, the W3C continues their work on XHTML 2.0. However, the W3C's work on XHTML 2.0 slowly fell into trouble, and later terminated the work on XHTML 2.0, and formed a new HTML working group in 2007. They very wisely chose the results of the WHATWG as the basis for Develop HTML5 specifications.

After years of deliberation, the draft of HTML5 was released in 2008, and W3C is currently further improving it. At this time, there is no clear statement on when HTML5 will officially become a standard. The good news is that HTML5 may be accepted as a candidate standard in 2012. However, it can be expected that whenever HTML5 becomes a standard, it will definitely be a long-term process for HTML5 to be accepted by all browser providers.