Opera Rep Provides HTML5 Overview

Patrick H. Lauke is the Web Evangelist at Opera Software and ran the Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Last week (July 13) he gave a talk to the Institutional Web Management Workshop on HTML5. He lead viewers on a general history of HTML5, through an overview of the specification, and then plans for the future.

Slides from his presentation have been posted, along with a video of the entire presentation. Sadly, watching just the slides means you miss out on his narrative, and watching just the video means you miss out on the slides. That’s why I’ve embedded both here. Because I had to scale them to fit in this layout, you may want to see the originals of each and view them side by side (links below).

His slides include code samples and URLs to check some of them out on your own. Even if you can’t get the video to work, spend some time perusing the slides (especially slide #4, from Bruce Lawson, which shows what HTML5 is not). If you can see the video, stick around for questions at the end.

The video is about 45 minutes and is peppered with lots of good insight. For example, he frames HTML5 as an extension of HTML4, providing more options and features. He points out that valid HTML4 or XHTML1 sites don’t need to be re-coded, something that many web novices worry about and web jerks may try to trick clients into doing. He even discusses his own opinions on new elements and features, such as article and video path obfuscation (to keep people from bypassing YouTube-style overlay ads).

Source:

• IWMW2010 – Patrick H. Lauke – HTML5 and friends (July 13, 2010) (watch the video, or download it in various formats).
• HTML5 and friends – Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010 (the slide show from the talk).