The Next-Gen Web: HTML5 - Will We Ever See A Real Standard?

The rest of the story where Microsoft wins, and more importantly, how they won, the browser war is common history. The web had fractured in a big way, with repercussions that would last for over a decade as thousands of developer hours go to waste producing cross-browser hacks and libraries. Despite Microsoft gaining dominance in the browser market and promoting multiple tiers of proprietary technology for building web applications, somehow simple HTML, Javascript and CSS eventually won over and Web 2.0 wasn't built on ActiveX.

Fast Forward Ten Years

While Netscape has disappeared and been replaced with Firefox, the battle for the web today is not only between browsers but also one between new web platforms and technologies. The market share of Internet Explorer has by some estimates been notched down to 78% (from a high in 2004 of 95%), with Firefox at 16% and Safari, Opera and others making up the remaining 6%. HTML 4.01 was published in December of 1999 and went on to become an ISO standard as the major browsers built in support for the spec. HTML 4.01 still remains the most widely and best supported HTML standard, but the problems today have migrated to other parts of the web technology stack, specifically with CSS and DOM access.

In what is now referred to as Web 2.0, thousands of rich web applications have been developed using HTML, CSS and XML - more commonly referred to as Ajax (ironically the a and x parts of Ajax started as a proprietary add-on to Internet Explorer in the form of xmlhttprequest). Ajax applications quickly reached limitations of what can be done with current technologies, but they had shortened the gap between desktop and web applications. A number of vendor-backed web client platforms such as Flash from Adobe and Silverlight from Microsoft have been released as a layer above the browser, presenting developers with a very rich desktop-like development environment for web applications. These new platforms work by extending existing browsers through plugins, and while these commercial solutions have already launched there is currently no suitable open source and open standards based alternative that extends beyond Ajax.

Frustrated by the lack of progress with HTML5 at the W3, a group of browser developers split off and formed WHATWG to further develop the specification. The primary mission of HTML5 was to recognize that the web has changed since the original HTML specs, as web applications were now capable of presenting very complex user interfaces and could make use of more advanced system functions (for the interface, Silverlight uses XAML while Flex/Flash uses MXML). The spec began as Web Applications 1.0, which was an umbrella term to describe not only the new HTML5 spec but other associated specifications such as CSS2, DOM5, ECMAv4 and new API calls (such as local browser storage).

The WHATWG working group spec was eventually (after 4 years) folded back into W3, and Microsoft joined the effort again. In the interim, developers searching for a rich web app platform beyond Ajax had little option other than to join either the Microsoft or Adobe universe. Progress on implementing the HTML5 spec was still very slow, until Google recognised the threat of a Microsoft or Adobe dominated web and stepped in by creating Gears. Gears is Google's way of hurrying up implementation of HTML5 features in browsers, and they have backed it at each step by having their own applications such as Gmail and Reader support the new API calls.

Apple is another company who are fully backing the open, HTML5 alternative for rich internet applications. It was only a few years ago that a visitor to the Apple homepage would find a page dominated by Flash and PDF files. Today Apple have their own open-standards based browser with Safari and back the Webkit open source project. They have also backed up their support for both the free and open alternative by re-engineering their websites and applications to use Ajax over proprietary alternatives such as Flash.

We are back in 1996 again and HTML5 is the new HTML 3.0, but instead of two major browser manufacturers today there are numerous parties with interest in determining what the new web API and virtual machine will look like. In the 1990's version of events, the open standards eventually won over - which both Microsoft and Adobe have recognized as they have released source code and API details for some parts of their platforms.

Web history teaches us that there is usually a single winner, as all users steadily migrate to the single winning solution which imposes itself as a standard (recall that many of today's 'standards' began life as proprietary technologies). There is a big difference though between a standard such as the Windows operating system, and an open standard such as HTML5 - and a repeat dose of the former is the biggest threat that companies such as Google and Apple currently face.

You can read the previous Next-Gen Web post about local browser storagehere.