HTML5 Is Here Now (It's Just Not For Your Desktop Yet) by DAM News Staff

June 18, 2010

513636061_98d07f7966_m-3253232 — Image by justinsomnia via Flickr

HTML5 Is Here Now (It’s Just Not For Your Desktop Yet) — Sencha Blog — JavaScript Framework and RIA Platform.

When squid feel threatened, they shoot ink into the water, hoping to confuse and disorient their predators. Something like that is happening right now in the web arena. Adobe and Microsoft are claiming HTML5 is ten years away. Apple is saying “no, no, it’s here right now, come look at our amazing HTML5 (urm… CSS3 + Javascript) demos.”

The truth is that there is a huge bifurcation in the web browser population evolving. On the desktop, Internet Explorer and Firefox between them have at least 80%+ of the market. Internet Explorer support of HTML 5 Family technologies ispractically non-existent, and Firefox is lagging in CSS3 implementation. But in any case, there is an enormous installed base of IE 6,7,8 on the desktop — particularly in the Enterprise — and no sane application developer would develop an application for the Enterprise desktop that didn’t run on IE7 at the very least. Except for forward thinking organizations, who deploy latest revision Firefox, Chrome or Safari for their employees, HTML5 technologies are a non-starter.

But it’s a completely different story on mobile devices. Not only are product life cycles much quicker (people replace their phone on averageevery 18 months), but tablets, phones and touch devices are practically on another planet when it come to their browser technology. And that’s because the default browser on every device that matters is based on Webkit.