HTML 5 is the next gold rush

HTML 5 is rising and rising fast. As per a research report by ABI research there will be 2.1 billion mobile devices with HTML5 browsers by 2016. There were just 109 million devices with HTML 5 supported browsers in 2010. This mass adoption is for a standard (HTML 5) which doesn’t even become final until 2010.

HTML 5 isn’t a big fat release like what we see in an iOS release or any software releases. HTML 5 is a collection small things (25 to be precise) which were accepted as standards and are now being developed by coders and supported by browsers. HTML 5 gives browser great capabilities and liberties. It almost makes browser the center of attraction, which means you might need little else, including a fancy app download.

Google’s Engineer Jered Wierzbicki, had explained in a blog post on the use of HTML5 Canvas for the latest doodle celebrating the birthday of Alexander Calder. The Google doodle swings and tilts if your computer and browser supports it. In the browser world that’s a big deal. This is the kind of thing we typically see on iPhones and Android phones. Having that feature on the browser isn’t just cool but very useful and probably an indication of million web apps brewing.

Similar to the Canvas used in Google’s Alexander Calder mobile doodle, there are 25 different HTML 5 elements which make the browser relevant in the age of social networking and geo-location dependency. HTML 5 provides great way to integrate videos without third party plugins, it lets you store stuff for offline browsing, storing data locally which is much more than cookie storing, using geo location from the browser and allowing javascript spawn multiple requests for parallel processing.

HTML 5’s features make the lives of app developers much easier. There is no reason to develop an app for iOS, Android and Blackberry. Instead the developers can focus their energies on developing kick ass mobile apps (and web apps) that work on browsers (not mobile OS’s).

Of course, browsers have to quickly come to the rescue of HTML 5 by supporting it. Chrome and Safari already support some elements of HTML5. IE and Firefox will slowly fall in line. Remember that HTML 5 support could mean support for any standard which is part of the 25 features. It can so happen that a set of features are supported on Chrome but a different set of features are supported on Safari. The onus is still on the developer to check for HTML5 support and to have a fall back plan in place to hand it over to native apps or make similar arrangements.

HTML5’s rise also means the slow death of Flash and Apple’s QuickTime. HTML 5 also means the slow down of native apps, and in turn app stores and eventually the mobile operating systems too. But that would be getting a little ahead of ourselves. Or may be not.

*Image credit Wikipedia