Google demo Google Wave and HTML5 support

The Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco is a chance for the outside world to see some of the exciting stuff that Google has on the horizon. Google’s reach is so broad that there will be something to excite everyone, but two notable developments that caught our eye are Google Wave and Google’s increasing support for HTML5.

Google Wave is an attempt to unify communication and collaboration on the web, and has been created by the original team behind Google Maps, as described in this Mashable article.

HTML5 on the other hand is clearly not a Google product but something that’s been on the horizon for web developers for sometime. Personally I’d prioritise cross-browser support for CSS3 over implementation of HTML5 support, but it’s clear that HTML5 does offer greater flexibility and power to web developers. The current example demo’ed by Google is the use of HTML5 to render video directly in the browser using the new <pre><video></pre> tag as opposed to needing an intermediary plugin [usually Flash]. You’ll need an HTML 5 capable browser to get the full benefit of this demo page on Youtube, though viewing the source [in any browser] demonstrates the different approach of using HTML5 markup.

29th May 2009

Ben Childs

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