Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have made the web more interactive and cool. Apart from the jargon "AJAX" there are many more things to it. The predominantly used tools for making the web richer are:
- Flash
- JavaFX
- Adobe AIR
- Microsoft's Silverlight etc.,
Though these tools make the web more powerful there is a bottom-line constraint of installing the plugins. How many time we face this problem of plugin not found?. (Particularly in Linux platform)
Qn : So what is the solution?
Ans: HTML 5.
HTML5 can redefine RIA to a greater extent. HTML5 provides tags for "video" etc. So if your browser can understand HTML5 then no need for any of the above plugins. The major advantages of this approach are:
- Web would become "open" with respect to RIA. All of the above said plugins are proprietary. We want web to be open. So it is better to use non-proprietary tools. (at least for client side if not all)
- Being the native code HTML5 would possibly be more optimized than plugins.
But the major bottleneck with HTML5 approach is that "your browser should support it". This might not happen overnight.
You might be knowing that HTML5 talk is there since 2008~. The support for HTML5 is slowly building up. For example Firefox version 3.5+ supports some of the tags provided by HTML5. With the recent release of IE9 (test) we saw that it supported HTML5 tags to a greater extent. (Imagine the situation M$ is in. One side they are promoting Silverlight and on the other side their recent browser supports HTML5 concepts.. I don't know whats their plan ahead). Once IE starts supporting it obviously more developers will move to HTML5 (according to the usage statistics).
Apart from this multimedia idea, HTML5 has got some other interesting items as well, like semantic based tags (header, footer, navigation etc), local storage etc.
Overall HTML5 can redefine our web experience in near future.
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