Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from hof
Speaker 1: dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: My name is Chris Poulette and I'm an editor at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com. Sitting here across from me
Speaker 1: as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strick. I crave baked goods. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't really have a lot of outtakes
Speaker 1: on this ship. I managed to say every bun last
Speaker 1: time and another and then I referenced it and you
Speaker 1: got it. Anyway, Thanks, You're welcome. So anyhow, we'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about HTML five. Why don't we? Why not?
Speaker 1: All right then, So, first of all, I would like
Speaker 1: to tell everyone out there in the listening audience we
Speaker 1: are currently recording this episode in the afternoon, in the
Speaker 1: middle of the week. Now, the reason why that's interesting
Speaker 1: to us is that we normally record on Friday mornings
Speaker 1: at the end of a long week, but this is
Speaker 1: a Tuesday afternoon and I'm feeling a little zany. So okay,
Speaker 1: but HTML five, So HTML five, before we even get
Speaker 1: into that, we need to talk about what hypertext markup
Speaker 1: language is. Yes, Now, this is the stuff that essentially,
Speaker 1: this language is what helps a web web developer design
Speaker 1: a web page so that it appears a certain way
Speaker 1: when you access it with a web browser. It's a
Speaker 1: very basis of making stuff appear on a web page
Speaker 1: the right way. And so this dates all the way
Speaker 1: back to the early nineties. Do you remember the early nineties? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: what a magical time that was. Huh No, no, you're right,
Speaker 1: let's move on. So but but in general, this is
Speaker 1: the stuff that has the tags in it that tell
Speaker 1: you know, the tag is essentially a message to the
Speaker 1: web browser saying, when you see this tag, you need
Speaker 1: to take this action, uh and make whatever comes after
Speaker 1: that appear a certain way on website. Or it may
Speaker 1: just be to help lay it out a certain way.
Speaker 1: And so, uh, there were a lot of tags that
Speaker 1: were developed for HTML, and eventually, uh, it got to
Speaker 1: the point where there needed to be a new implementation
Speaker 1: of HTML because it was starting to get a little clunky, right,
Speaker 1: you know, they had a lot of tags there and
Speaker 1: it was not elegant and confusing for someone who was
Speaker 1: just trying to start up a website. So there were
Speaker 1: attempts to make that more streamlined. Yeah, just just for clarification,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about tags, basically, uh, an HTML document
Speaker 1: document is simply a text document um. So it's it's
Speaker 1: basically your your your letters, your numbers, uh, all those
Speaker 1: kinds of standard text characters with no formatting whatsoever. In fact,
Speaker 1: you're the ones supplying the formatting. If you want something
Speaker 1: in in bold in the current version of HTML, you
Speaker 1: would type I want this text in bold, and before
Speaker 1: that you would type of tag called strong, which is
Speaker 1: put in between in between brackets, and at the end
Speaker 1: of the text that you want bold, you would put
Speaker 1: what they call a clothes tag, which is a slight
Speaker 1: variant on that, basically to say, I want the following
Speaker 1: in bold. I wanted to stop here, and it goes
Speaker 1: in for that. It could be italic, it could be underlined,
Speaker 1: it could be struck through or you That's how you
Speaker 1: put in hyperlinks, that's how you put in images. Is
Speaker 1: alway these little tags and it's all in uh more
Speaker 1: or less plain English. You're not doing a lot of
Speaker 1: calculation like you would in any a typical programming language,
Speaker 1: like for example, see where you're actually putting in variables
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. That's why HTML is is popular
Speaker 1: for people who are sort of dabbling in the idea
Speaker 1: of programming because it sort of gives you an idea
Speaker 1: of what coding is like without a whole lot of
Speaker 1: coding UM and you and it's very simple to do.
Speaker 1: It's based on a standard page definition UM, which is
Speaker 1: maintained by the UH the W three C, the World
Speaker 1: Old Wide Web Consortium. Yeah, I love that word. Yep,
Speaker 1: Web's great word. UM an consortium is also awesome. Oh
Speaker 1: yeah that too. So yeah, if you were to go
Speaker 1: and view a web page, if you were to view
Speaker 1: the source of that web page, uh, the you can
Speaker 1: look at the source code. It's essentially it's really just
Speaker 1: a series of directions like what we said, that tell
Speaker 1: the browser what how to lay that page out. And
Speaker 1: so it's not software. HTML is not a programming language.
Speaker 1: It's a markup language. And what happens is that the
Speaker 1: companies that make the web browsers have to incorporate the
Speaker 1: whatever the standard version of HTML happens to be into
Speaker 1: the web browser so that when you access a website,
Speaker 1: it uh it it displays that website the right way
Speaker 1: asterisk asterisk and the asterisk there is that they don't
Speaker 1: have to nobody's telling them. They have to abide by
Speaker 1: all the laws, which has been a point of much
Speaker 1: contention in the past, because UM, there will be a
Speaker 1: standard release. There was HTML two and three, and now,
Speaker 1: as of the time we're recording this in September two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, the official recognized version of HTML is HTML four.
Speaker 1: UM it's it's been updated a couple of times, and
Speaker 1: people thought that HTML wasn't going to be updated at
Speaker 1: all anymore, that it was essentially dead. But leave that
Speaker 1: for a minute. UM. The thing is UM these these specifications.
Speaker 1: The browser manufacturers Google for Chrome, UH, Apple for Safari
Speaker 1: Opera which is a Norwegian company, Microsoft for i E
Speaker 1: UM Internet Explorer, and and and others. There are many others. UM.
Speaker 1: They basically have to adopt the guts of this thing.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted your text to be bold, you
Speaker 1: can use the old B or you can use the
Speaker 1: newer strong and they're they're all going to recognize that.
Speaker 1: But they're they're usually backwards compatible, so that because if
Speaker 1: they weren't backwards compatible, any web page that had been
Speaker 1: does mine with the old tags would be unrecognizable and
Speaker 1: would not display properly on your screen. So if you
Speaker 1: need to get your MIDI file fixed, you can still
Speaker 1: go back to a page from and observe that. Um.
Speaker 1: But that was the thing for a while, was oh well,
Speaker 1: filling the name of the company here isn't completely compliant
Speaker 1: with the newest standard of HTML. And um, you know,
Speaker 1: Microsoft went on their own for a while, and um
Speaker 1: that was it wasn't the kind of thing that the
Speaker 1: average person would notice. It was more of a tech
Speaker 1: head thing where they were going, well, you know so
Speaker 1: and so it was more compatible. Yeah, so the HTML
Speaker 1: four and also x htmlor UM, which is another type
Speaker 1: of market language, these languages. Well, HTML four anyway, that
Speaker 1: was the latest version, the one that everyone is considered
Speaker 1: the standard. The current standard was released in a late nineties. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you've got this uh, this markup language that's over
Speaker 1: a decade old. And here's the problem. The problem is
Speaker 1: that the markup language as it was designed back then
Speaker 1: could not support some of the more rich Internet UH
Speaker 1: features that we've come to know and love over the years,
Speaker 1: things like video and audio. Stuff that is a more
Speaker 1: of a rich experience was not supported in HTML four. Yeah.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, if you go to UH
Speaker 1: many popular sites, um, you're going to and view the
Speaker 1: source as Jonathan suggested a moment ago. You're gonna see HTML,
Speaker 1: but you're also likely to see other stuff in there too,
Speaker 1: And you're gonna say, but, Jonathan and Chris, you told
Speaker 1: me that i'd pretty much be able to read the
Speaker 1: text file in the back end. What's all this other
Speaker 1: programming stuff? Well, it could be JavaScript, which popular, which
Speaker 1: is UH a language, a very mild programming language that
Speaker 1: you can use to add some interactivity to websites. And
Speaker 1: you're also likely to see UH an embed code for
Speaker 1: FLASH on a lot of interactive media sites. UM and
Speaker 1: probably just about everybody listening to this US is UH
Speaker 1: familiar with flash. But it was a technology developed by
Speaker 1: the UH design software company Macromedia before it merged with Adobe,
Speaker 1: UH slash acquired by Adobe, and UM. Basically, UH flash
Speaker 1: has been the standard for many years for designing rich
Speaker 1: Internet content, animations, embedding video and things not not YouTube
Speaker 1: videos or things like that or vino. But you know,
Speaker 1: special people would produce these things in house and put
Speaker 1: them on their websites, or they would contract a designer
Speaker 1: to put this kind of interactive content on there. A
Speaker 1: lot of shopping sites like to use it so you
Speaker 1: can customize your room or things the UM and and
Speaker 1: so HTML itself doesn't have any way to do that
Speaker 1: kind of content. Now, you can link to something, you
Speaker 1: can embed an image, UM or or files on the site,
Speaker 1: but you might if you click on that file, it
Speaker 1: might just load in another UM another kind of application,
Speaker 1: for example UM. So it really didn't support it the
Speaker 1: way that it could be done if you used flash
Speaker 1: for example. Right, So instead what you would have to
Speaker 1: do is install these plug ins into your browser. So
Speaker 1: these are plug ins or extensions that would make your
Speaker 1: browser capable of seeing this kind of information, because again,
Speaker 1: on their own, they might not necessarily be able to
Speaker 1: do that. So if you've ever gone to a website
Speaker 1: and it's prompted you to install a plug in, first
Speaker 1: of all, be careful, yes, because that's a very common
Speaker 1: technique of installing malware onto your computer. If it's if
Speaker 1: it's a site that you trust, and you feel reasonably
Speaker 1: sure that there's not any uh hanky nor panky going
Speaker 1: on at that particular moment, then that might be what
Speaker 1: you need. You might to install a plug in order
Speaker 1: to view whatever that content is or interact with that
Speaker 1: site in some way. So that was one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why, uh, there there needed to be this update
Speaker 1: to HTML was to design a markup language that was
Speaker 1: backwards compatible so that you could still see those old sites,
Speaker 1: but also more streamlined again, so that someone who's building
Speaker 1: something from the ground up starting with HTML five would
Speaker 1: be able to do so without it being too confusing.
Speaker 1: They didn't want the barrier to be too high, and
Speaker 1: also they wanted to be able to natively support these
Speaker 1: rich Internet interactions without the requirement of some sort of
Speaker 1: additional plug in. So this is what kind of prompted
Speaker 1: companies like Apple in particular to push for HTML five
Speaker 1: because the uh, the alternative is to support all these plugins,
Speaker 1: and if there were just one type of plug for
Speaker 1: each type of rich media kind of experience, maybe that
Speaker 1: wouldn't be such a big deal. You know. It would
Speaker 1: mean that perhaps the browser would be clunkier than it
Speaker 1: needed to be, but you would have that one solution.
Speaker 1: But the fact is, there's not just one solution. For
Speaker 1: a while, there were there were a few different competing
Speaker 1: technologies that we're all doing the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But it would mean that, you know, you could be
Speaker 1: watching video on one site and everything's fine, and then
Speaker 1: you would go to a different site and suddenly it
Speaker 1: would prompt you to get a different kind of plug
Speaker 1: in because the plug and you were using does not
Speaker 1: work with that particular video. So the two in particular,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of our flash and silver Light. Yes, a
Speaker 1: silver light came from Microsoft, and uh, anyone who was
Speaker 1: watching um I remember in the two thousand I think
Speaker 1: it was a two thousand eight Olympics where if you
Speaker 1: wanted to watch the stuff online you had to use
Speaker 1: silver light, at least in the United States, And so
Speaker 1: U that meant that I installed silver Light on my
Speaker 1: computer because I wanted to watch some of the stuff.
Speaker 1: And and you know, it's it's just not an ideal
Speaker 1: solution in the sense that you know, you've got a
Speaker 1: browser that's getting heavier and heavier as far as code
Speaker 1: is going, because you're plugging in all this stuff. It
Speaker 1: would be nicer if it were all built in from
Speaker 1: the ground up and you didn't have to worry about that.
Speaker 1: So that was one of the reasons for HTMO five.
Speaker 1: Another was that we're slowly getting closer to this idea
Speaker 1: of the semantic web, where the web is quote unquote
Speaker 1: getting smarter. And what I mean by that is that
Speaker 1: it's easier for you to access the information you are
Speaker 1: particularly interested in. So if I'm doing a search for
Speaker 1: a very specific type of information with the semantic Web,
Speaker 1: I would ideally get precisely what I needed from that,
Speaker 1: and not just a bunch of links to things that
Speaker 1: may or may not have the answer to my question.
Speaker 1: Uh So, h g mL five has organizational tags in it,
Speaker 1: things like section or article or side or header that
Speaker 1: can help when you're doing a search. It can help
Speaker 1: identify things that are more important within the confines of
Speaker 1: that web page than others. So that way, let's say
Speaker 1: that you're a web page developer and you've used these
Speaker 1: tags to kind of organize your web page. You've got
Speaker 1: an entire section that's about the search terms that I'm
Speaker 1: looking for. It's more likely that that's going to come
Speaker 1: up for me when I'm using some sort of search tool,
Speaker 1: because you have laid it out in such a way
Speaker 1: that the search engine knows, hey, this is a section
Speaker 1: that directly pertains to the search terms that were entered. Um,
Speaker 1: so those were that's also another consideration. So HTML five
Speaker 1: has really had a big push, particularly from companies like Apple,
Speaker 1: over the last well several years, actually UH, and that
Speaker 1: has been the battle cry for a lot of these
Speaker 1: companies that HTML five is the future. You should stop
Speaker 1: developing for things like flash and other plug ins because
Speaker 1: that's just holding us back. Instead, put your energy toward
Speaker 1: getting the HTML five to a complete standard, because as
Speaker 1: it stands now, it's still being developed. Yeah, the UH
Speaker 1: HTML five, for all of its uh prominence in the
Speaker 1: tech news in the last couple of years, UM, you
Speaker 1: you would think that it was fairly new. But an
Speaker 1: organization called what would well Okay, that's my best guess
Speaker 1: on how to pronounce it, w h A t w G.
Speaker 1: That's the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Basically, it's
Speaker 1: a group of companies or organizations that decided to UH
Speaker 1: put their efforts together and update HTML. The idea is, UH,
Speaker 1: you know, or behind it was, hey, we don't you know,
Speaker 1: HTML by itself can't do what we wanted to do,
Speaker 1: what we want to be able to make available to
Speaker 1: our customers. So let's see if we can come up
Speaker 1: with a new standard. And back in two thousand four, UM,
Speaker 1: Apple Mozilla, which is the organization behind the Firefox browser
Speaker 1: and opera software UM got together and said, let's UH,
Speaker 1: you know, we're we don't really like this extensible h
Speaker 1: t m L x HTML that W three C is
Speaker 1: working on. Let's see if we can come up with
Speaker 1: something we like better and then we'll present it um
Speaker 1: And so for a while, X HTML and HTML five
Speaker 1: were competing standards, with x t X h t m
Speaker 1: L in the lead. It looks like that was going
Speaker 1: to be the successor to h t m L four.
Speaker 1: I think what eventually forced HTML five into prominence was
Speaker 1: the uh that this was on the pre post PC era.
Speaker 1: But now now that we're talking about tablets, so the
Speaker 1: pre post PC era, that might just be the PC
Speaker 1: RU stop messing with my head. Uh No. I said
Speaker 1: that on purpose to see if you're I was listening
Speaker 1: or if I was just so uh so, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean this is this is one of those things where
Speaker 1: they said, okay, let's see what what we can come
Speaker 1: up with. And so HTML five again isn't it hasn't
Speaker 1: been ratified, it hasn't been standardized, but uh, it was
Speaker 1: forced into the media when the I think when the
Speaker 1: iPad came out in two thousand ten, because basically Apple
Speaker 1: bet on HTML five. Now it's one of the members,
Speaker 1: one of the founding members of what would So you
Speaker 1: would say, well, okay, sure they're promoting their own standard.
Speaker 1: Um Apple's argument and leaving flash off the iPad and
Speaker 1: the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Um It's basically, look,
Speaker 1: flash can be a resource hog. It takes a lot
Speaker 1: of processing power to run this. It's gonna slow you down.
Speaker 1: You're on, on on using these gadgets, and we're just
Speaker 1: not gonna put flash on this. Also, it was going
Speaker 1: to drain your battery because it was such a it
Speaker 1: was taking up so many resources, which in turn required
Speaker 1: more power that you would end up having a mobile
Speaker 1: device that would have a useful battery life of a
Speaker 1: few hours, which you know is not acceptable if you're
Speaker 1: looking for something like a mobile phone. I mean, most
Speaker 1: of us don't plug our phones in every couple of
Speaker 1: hours to recharge, and if we had to, I think
Speaker 1: most of us would be dissatisfied with that experience. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, uh, the the iPhone and iPod Touch predate
Speaker 1: the iPad, and it was apparent that flash was not
Speaker 1: going on those anytime soon. But I think the iPad really,
Speaker 1: the launch of the iPad really brought it into relief.
Speaker 1: They said Hey, if you got a device this big,
Speaker 1: if you can look at web pages on this thing,
Speaker 1: it's intended for surfing in part, why wouldn't you include flash?
Speaker 1: Come on, Steve, But he said, nope, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to do it. Apple is not going to do it.
Speaker 1: You're on your own. And some other big companies have really,
Speaker 1: uh at least at least capitulated to that sort of view,
Speaker 1: if not like wholeheartedly thrown in, some of them have
Speaker 1: have have started to to acquiesce to to say, all right,
Speaker 1: you know the writings on the wall, this this has
Speaker 1: to change. And there's so much momentum going forward that
Speaker 1: we're going to back HTML five even if we're not
Speaker 1: going to champion it. Um, there there are a lot
Speaker 1: of examples out there. I mean, heck, YouTube has has
Speaker 1: an opt in service where you can view the videos
Speaker 1: via HTML five as opposed to flash based players. So
Speaker 1: that was a big That was a big thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: you think about how many videos are up on YouTube.
Speaker 1: That's a massive undertaking. Yeah, yeah, that was that. That
Speaker 1: actually is a good point because, um, you couldn't go
Speaker 1: to YouTube and view videos on the iPad when it
Speaker 1: first came out, because it was flash based players. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh that that's one of the reasons that they've
Speaker 1: that Apple has had that YouTube app that it recently
Speaker 1: did away with from iOS six. There was a native
Speaker 1: app on iOS that would allow you to access certain
Speaker 1: YouTube videos that that we're compatible with that app, So
Speaker 1: that would that was sort of Apple's answer and Google's answer,
Speaker 1: uh in the short term, while there was this initiative
Speaker 1: to try and convert videos from flash based to HTML
Speaker 1: five based videos. So um so yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: this is when people started going, well, or you know,
Speaker 1: which side are you on? Are you on the HTML
Speaker 1: five side or are you on the flash side? Come on?
Speaker 1: Flashes is lovely. It does all the things we needed
Speaker 1: to do. There are so many flash games. Um. Facebook
Speaker 1: was one of those companies in particular that was sort
Speaker 1: of um, I think, uh sort of a battleground if
Speaker 1: you will, because so much traffic on Facebook uh involves
Speaker 1: rich media content, especially the games and other applications that
Speaker 1: that people run on there. So um and of course
Speaker 1: Facebook having uh you know, a billion people more or less. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's a whole lot of web traffic and and and
Speaker 1: organizations like YouTube and Facebook are going to be the
Speaker 1: places where they're sort of litmus tests for the rest
Speaker 1: of the web. You know, do you have rich media content?
Speaker 1: If so, how are you displaying it? So yeah, YouTube
Speaker 1: chose to make its pages render in HTML five, So
Speaker 1: pointing Facebook, going back to Facebook, Facebook, this is an
Speaker 1: interesting and somewhat I don't know if controversial is the
Speaker 1: right word for it, but there are people have there
Speaker 1: have been arguments that have broken out online about what
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg said in September two twelve about face Facebook
Speaker 1: and HTML five. He actually said, essentially, our biggest mistake
Speaker 1: was betting too much on h GML five and this
Speaker 1: I read this originally in tech crunch Um. But the
Speaker 1: the problem was that they Facebook had a choice. They
Speaker 1: could either develop apps for HTML five, thinking well, this
Speaker 1: is the ideal situation, because if this is the standard,
Speaker 1: then everyone is going to incorporate HTML five in their products,
Speaker 1: which means we don't have to sit there and create
Speaker 1: a native application for each operating system that's on a
Speaker 1: mobile device. Is primarily for mobile here that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: So they thought, all right, let's throw let's throw all
Speaker 1: we have into HTML five and start developing for it.
Speaker 1: But then they discovered a problem and the problem is
Speaker 1: that ht mm L five is not fully baked and
Speaker 1: the implementation of it in hardware is not fully baked,
Speaker 1: so it's not They were discovering that the the experience
Speaker 1: that users were having on HTML i've based apps on
Speaker 1: these devices was not ideal. That things were slow, certain
Speaker 1: features weren't weren't supported through HTML five UM, and it
Speaker 1: just was it was not a great experience. And so
Speaker 1: people were like, this app is terrible, and people were
Speaker 1: reviewing apps saying, this app is awful because it takes
Speaker 1: forever considering what I'm asking it to do. I can't
Speaker 1: believe it takes so long for me to accomplish these goals.
Speaker 1: And so that was one of the issues. And then
Speaker 1: they said, well, if we had instead spent all that
Speaker 1: time and energy and thought on designing native applications for
Speaker 1: these devices, they could take advantage of each devices UH
Speaker 1: hardware capabilities and UH and their operating systems in a
Speaker 1: way that would be a much more satisfying experience for
Speaker 1: the user. Even though that means that we are contributing
Speaker 1: to this sort of fragmented approach to developing apps. And
Speaker 1: you know, this was a big This caused a lot
Speaker 1: of Uh, it was a bit of a kerfuffle that
Speaker 1: fall fell out about this, and I think part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that HTML five is a little too
Speaker 1: It's it's not ready for prime time yet, and that
Speaker 1: the hardware and the the hardware is not really there
Speaker 1: to support it. The markup language is not mature enough yet,
Speaker 1: the implementation of it is not mature enough yet, so
Speaker 1: the experience is not, uh, not going to be great
Speaker 1: across the board, particularly in the mobile world, and that
Speaker 1: perhaps a couple of years down the line, HTML five
Speaker 1: will be the obvious answer, right but right now it's not.
Speaker 1: And the problem is Facebook jumped on it a little
Speaker 1: too early. Yeah, and people, of course, uh initially when
Speaker 1: that comment came out, I think it it caused the
Speaker 1: sturb because it was pretty strongly worded. I've seen several
Speaker 1: commentaries and said, well, you know, it's probably not their
Speaker 1: biggest mistake ever. Um, but yeah, I mean it's so
Speaker 1: it's so hard to tell at this point what is
Speaker 1: and what isn't going to be in the final implementation
Speaker 1: of HTML five. But development has been steady on it
Speaker 1: since it's been announced and adopted by so many companies.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, I think betting the farm on it
Speaker 1: or betting the farmville. I see what you did there,
Speaker 1: Uh might might be a bit extreme. Uh yeah, there
Speaker 1: there There have been some HTML five games and things
Speaker 1: that I've seen pop up on Facebook. The majority of
Speaker 1: them are still baked in flash. UM. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean even even Adobe whose product flash is um has
Speaker 1: been backing off to some degree. I mean even even
Speaker 1: h Flash for Android has been discontinued officially UM. And and
Speaker 1: and it appears that they have gone into the business
Speaker 1: of building HTML five encoding tools, which uh, you know
Speaker 1: would seem to be the smart move. So yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: The thing is that it also goes into the whole
Speaker 1: is it the web or is it mobile app? See
Speaker 1: that's a That's another interesting point is that when the
Speaker 1: when the when HTML five, when they were starting to
Speaker 1: develop it for HTML five, that was pre mobile, I mean,
Speaker 1: before smartphones had really hit the consumer market, before tablets
Speaker 1: had really hit the consumer market. You're talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: the original When first looking into HTML five, you're almost
Speaker 1: looking at two different branches of the web. Because there's
Speaker 1: the computer experience, which you know, a lot of us
Speaker 1: are familiar with because that's how we learned to use
Speaker 1: the web that was that was the way the main
Speaker 1: way to use the web, and now mobile is increasingly
Speaker 1: taking that over and becoming the dominant way that a
Speaker 1: lot of people are rely upon in order to access
Speaker 1: the web. So it means that while while the considerations
Speaker 1: you made for this markup language might have made perfect
Speaker 1: sense for a desktop or laptop computer that has access
Speaker 1: to greater resources than your typical mobile device does, now
Speaker 1: you have to rethink all that again because you're talking about, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the mobile approach, and it's not necessarily the
Speaker 1: people behind HTML five that have to do the rethinking.
Speaker 1: It's the hardware developers and the operating system developers who
Speaker 1: have to really consider how to implement this in a
Speaker 1: way that fits in the mobile world. And remember the
Speaker 1: mobile world, you've got several challenges battery life, like we
Speaker 1: mentioned as a challenge limited resources because in general, you
Speaker 1: tend to have lower powered chips because lower powered chips
Speaker 1: are going to drain a battery more slowly, and they
Speaker 1: generate less heat, which is important for a mobile device.
Speaker 1: And you're going to have a different form factor. So
Speaker 1: all of those things play into designing the operating system
Speaker 1: and its capabilities and features. In a mobile platform as
Speaker 1: well as you know, how do we implement this HTML five,
Speaker 1: what's it going to look like in the mobile space,
Speaker 1: how's it going to behave, how's it going to access
Speaker 1: the resources we have when we try to render a
Speaker 1: web page that is um that has been built through
Speaker 1: HTML five. So it's it's you know, it's not a
Speaker 1: simple answer, because it's not oh well, you just need
Speaker 1: to change this one aspect of HTML five and everything
Speaker 1: works perfectly. No, it's it's more of that relationship of
Speaker 1: operating system to hardware where there's going to be a
Speaker 1: bit of a bottleneck, at least in the short term.
Speaker 1: It may very well be that in a year or
Speaker 1: two years will have some breakthroughs where the because of
Speaker 1: architecture or because of operating system design, that no longer
Speaker 1: becomes a real issue. And HTML five is the obvious answer.
Speaker 1: But for right now, that native app approach looks like
Speaker 1: that makes more sense, at least for Facebook. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, as Matta say said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's also in the implementation too. It's not just the
Speaker 1: h t m L five, it's the way it was
Speaker 1: rolled out. I'm sure once they've had an opportunity to
Speaker 1: you to retreat and regather uh their resources that you
Speaker 1: know that will be able to do that. But you know,
Speaker 1: it does affect so many people that you know, building
Speaker 1: you know, building any architecture. We've talked about the many
Speaker 1: times that there have been redesigns and outcries and whatnot. Sure,
Speaker 1: so yes, there's at least a brew haha if not
Speaker 1: a kerfuffle. Yes, yes, I would agree there is at
Speaker 1: least a brew haha, which as you know, is three
Speaker 1: brooms short of a kerfuffle, but six brooms more than shenanigans.
Speaker 1: So um yeah, it's uh, it'll be interesting to see
Speaker 1: how this develops. I'm sure we will continue to see
Speaker 1: developments in HTML five as well as its implementation. Uh
Speaker 1: and and like I said, maybe a couple of years
Speaker 1: down the road, that will be what everyone develops in
Speaker 1: because it saves so much time to do it through
Speaker 1: HTML five as opposed to designing native apps for you know, however,
Speaker 1: many operating systems are out there. Granted, it may very
Speaker 1: well be that the operating systems that are out there
Speaker 1: boiled down to uh you know, Windows eight, iOS and
Speaker 1: and Android, but you never know, we could still see
Speaker 1: one of the other operating systems rise up, or even
Speaker 1: a new one take takes center stage. I mean, no
Speaker 1: one thought that palm would go anywhere when it oh
Speaker 1: wait yeah, um yeah, and and that that's that's a
Speaker 1: good point too. I mean that, uhh, this is this
Speaker 1: is one of those things that I think will will
Speaker 1: play itself out in in the standards simply because, uh,
Speaker 1: it will be more universal and give people an easier
Speaker 1: and more enjoyable experience once assuming that it does get adopted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like from most what I've seen most recently
Speaker 1: we're talking about as far as an actual standard is adopted,
Speaker 1: at least that's the proposed date at this point, so
Speaker 1: it's it's still a couple of years off. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: the nice thing is that when you think about one
Speaker 1: of the nice things about this is is when you
Speaker 1: get to a point where HTML five becomes the basis
Speaker 1: for most apps, or at least a good selection of them. Uh,
Speaker 1: the nice thing about that is you can sit there
Speaker 1: and get to a point where you know that the
Speaker 1: app version of a particular thing, or the app on
Speaker 1: your smartphone is going to work more or less the
Speaker 1: same way as the app on someone else's smartphone, even
Speaker 1: if they have two different operating systems, which is kind
Speaker 1: of nice because right now that is not the case.
Speaker 1: There are so many apps out there that have dramatically
Speaker 1: different sets of features from one operating system to another,
Speaker 1: because one of them may support something natively and one
Speaker 1: may not, or because maybe one company has a huge
Speaker 1: amount of horsepower on their mobile device but only allows
Speaker 1: their own apps to have access to that power, and
Speaker 1: no one else's apps can access that power. I'm not
Speaker 1: naming names, Okay, I just don't own one of those,
Speaker 1: um anyway, I'm kidding. I actually do own one desk
Speaker 1: right now. All right, So we're going to wrap this up.
Speaker 1: This was, you know, really again we're looking at this
Speaker 1: whole Facebook HTML five mistake. I think even Zuckerberg would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just too early to make that move. It
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily that it's the wrong move in the long run.
Speaker 1: It's definitely the wrong move when they made it, so,
Speaker 1: I don't know, yeah, biggest mistake, that's arguable. There have
Speaker 1: been people who said, what about launching that I p
Speaker 1: oh so quickly. Of course they were really pressured to
Speaker 1: do that. There wasn't a whole lot of choice in
Speaker 1: that either. But although they could have anyway, that's a
Speaker 1: totally different podcast which I think I think we've actually
Speaker 1: recorded it. So um. You guys, if you have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for upcoming episodes of tech Stuff, something that you
Speaker 1: want to know way more about, you should definitely drop
Speaker 1: us a line let us know. We'll be happy to
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