HTML 5 and future software development

The W3 consortium, well known for its HTML standards and markup language variant, prepares the release of the HTML5. Let's see why this is of interest to us:


HTML, roughly

(X)HTML is the language used to format information within web pages. It's a markup language, just like XML, allowing for self description of information (for robots, search engines) as well as the delivery and linking of written data to readers worldwide, through the world wide web.

The work towards HTML5 began in 2003, although the first official hints towards its development reached the public around 2007. A rather long delay that can easily be explained by the need for HTML backwards compatibility as well as the impressive set of features and structural additions added on top of the existing HTML  4.01 and XHTML 2.0 languages that fuels every web page on the world wide web (www).


The multimedia revolution, again.

HTML is not anymore just a way to format text and links. The HTML5 format is a revolution by itself, allowing anyone to spread media content easily, without the need for complex and expensive development tools, often breaking compatibility or metadata of the online content.

HTML has been rethought to bring more media power to the user, and as a result a greater freedom: everyone will be able to host videos from their holidays or their musical creations on their personal website transparently. The need for video content websites becomes immediately less important, provided a simple search engine would bring you to the music or videos hosted by anyone, on their personal website, thanks to the added media functionality, and greatly improved metadata handlers.


Beamreactor, in all this?

We'll first consider migrating, that is correcting deprecated elements to the HTML5 standard. Then, we might start to downgrade our heavy and CPU expensive video and streaming systems to simple video repositories. New graphic functionalities brought by HTML5 will be exploited to develop a new generation of web skins. Finally, thanks to a better handling of meta data, commands such as "nav" might be a good complement for our  XML sitemap generators.

Obviously, much more will be considered once a roadmap has been set. Hopefully this will brush away some of the dust that slowly covered the web during the last few years!


Treveur BRETAUDIERE, Beamreactor CEO.



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