Developers of today are right now heavily at work on a standard that might change the entire web as we know it. It’s called HTML 5.0, and some recent announcements have made us think about the dominance of content-heavy browser addons like JavaFX.

Since video has grown to such an essential block of the modern web browser experience, it can be weird to be reminded of the notion that a majority of the content we view comes to us through a developer plugin. There’s not really anything essentially wrong with such a notion, for the most part.

Protocols Online

But the internet is founded upon open, cross-platform standards. Right now, all the standards for flash video are created by Adobe. While there’s no chance of Adobe falling off the map, the important thing is that having every ‘rich’ web video moving through the plug-in of a private developer goes against the open standards that constitute the www itself.

Therefore HTML 5.0 has chosen to resolve this problem. Now, squads of programmers are deep at work powering through a future standard for the internet, a standard that that can deal with rich content and make it possible for videos and various multimedia to be held directly in the HTML protocol, not sent through browser plugins.

What HTML 5.0 Means for the Designer of Today

This is crucial because the internet of the moment could seem quite different in the coming months. While a sizable quantity of the rich functionality will surely mimic the top elements of the rich plugins we’re habituated to, the quantity of innovation achievable inside a web browser shall go way past that.

If you take a quick peek at what companies similar to Google have managed to do with contemporary HTML standards (think about how flowing Google Maps is), and all the new developments that have been located into our browsing experiences, think about a whole new level of possibilities still to come.

Is This All Coming Soon?

In all probability not as soon as we’d all hope. Web standards demand a very great time to develop and integrate, as they must be 100% universal, accessible, and work properly across all future web browsers. It’s much like coming up with a whole new language, and this language is likely on track to be the most complicated up until now.

All the sober guesses put the time-frame for 100%, rich HTML 5.0 roll-out somewhere way in the future, even five years. Although aspects of the protocol shall become common way before then (some are already being integrated as I scribble my article), the full embrace by all browsers, spanning all platforms, is simply too complicated and requires too much work for a quick integration.

Flash Will Still Be Around For A While

Mainly, they aren’t that worried. In private, who can say? According to all three browser addon developers, there shall always be a place for rich content, and building an entire brand on one function (let’s say, flash that plays video) is not a 100% profit-builder anyway.

When the HTML 5.0 standard becomes widely accepted, plugin creators will have had many years to develop further advancements that won’t be topped by the new standard, and we will probably be in the same mess once again.