amidst debate from Flash fans whether HTML 5 will ever exist Apple shipped it in Safari 5

Flash-based developers got a shock this week when Apple released Safari 5.

It is sometimes funny what people will claim in an argument, or even argue about.

Whether HTML 5 would ever exist was one of those things. Is it not true that 5 comes after 4?  How does one think we got to 4?  We got there from 4.01, 3.2, 2, and the original HTML created by the founder of the web on Steve Job's NeXT OS (now called simply Mac OS X) back in 1989. That version might have been called 1.0, but nobody was assigning version numbers back then.

As someone who has been using the web since the year Mosaic came out back in the early 1990s, I saw a lot of growth, evolution, and change in the web.

Most of it occurred in the 1990s, when Netscape was the dominant player on the web browser scene.  After Microsoft succeeded in "cutting off their air supply" as Microsoft executives put it, according to the antitrust case Microsoft lost, it lost interest in actually improving the web.

IE languished for years, with little more than bug fixes, just like MS Windows did.

Both the IE hemisphere and the Windows hemisphere of the Microsoft leadership brain slumbered through much of the 2000s.

Until Apple shipped the Safari web browser and it got markets share via the Mac, Windows, and iPhones.  Until Firefox sprung forth from the ashes Netscape's Mozilla project.  Until Google showed a tech savvy company could create its own web browser using Apple's WebKit, and offer the browser, just like Apple does - on smart phones and web browsers simultaneously.

Oh, yeah, and then there is the Google-written addon for IE that Google wrote in compliance with Microsoft's own APIs that steps in and takes over the job of rendering an HTML page when Microsoft's programming code notices it really does not know anything but HTML 4 and will probably flub the job.

Google's Chrome Frame tells it, "yes, you can!" and properly does the job for it.  I like the idea.  Lots of pages created for IE6, and IE5, and so forth do not even work anymore in any version of IE. They were not just IE-specific but IE version specific.

This Chrome Frame addon simply gives a chance for real web pages to be shown on the screen in IE.

Those pages do not have to be written as temporary documents for temporary, soon to be retired version of IE.  They can be written for all versions of all browsers because they are written to a standard, W3 HTML standard that is, that mastered backward compatibility far better than Microsoft did and will.

Safari 5 has a ton of features.  It includes a lot of the HTML 5 support that web developers and designers have been clamoring for.  There  are a lot powerful new features that are here now.  This browser works on Macintosh computers and brands of PCs running Microsoft Windows.

• HTML 5 forms validation
• HTML 5 offline storage
• HTML 5 tags for writers/authors/reporters: article, section, header, footer, aside, etc.
• HTML 5 tags for designers/developers: nav
• HTML 5 canvas tag
• HTML 5 video tag
• HTML 5 audio tag
• HTML 5 draggable attribute
• HTML 5 contenteditable
• HTML 5 sandboxed iframe tag (nice to see someone thinking of security for users)
• WebSocket
• EventSource
• web workers
• Ajax history
• page history search by words in title not simply the leading characters of the URL
• closed caption support for video tag (nice to see someone remembering the handicapped)
• Extensions Builder that packages HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other resources into a redistributable self-installing file you create easily by editing a visual template (now we know why Adobe screamed about HTML 5; the future was too simple/easy and free)
• Web Inspector which lets you understand the innards of your HTML page, measure/visualize the time it takes each respective file used by it to download and render, investigate the DOM (no, not the Godfather, silly) and work out kinks in your scripts and your page rendering
• Hardware acceleration on Windows (something Microsoft has not promised until at least 2011 which is sad because it is their own OS)

It seems really likely we will soon see a comparable release of Google Chrome application for Windows & Mac, Chrome Frame addon for IE, and eventually for some versions of the Android operating system.

It is almost certain we will see this Safari 5 browser's HTML 5 features pushed into iPhones, iPods, and iPads sometime during this month.

Mozilla, which is probably already running at flag speed to get more HTML 5 features in its well endowed web browser will probably redouble its efforts, encouraged by Apple's success. It is not only doable but more worthwhile than ever to have a Firefox with major HTML 5 support included.

The amount of critical mass composed of the latest versions of Firefox and Safari combined is huge.  IE users rarely update their browser, their plugins, or their operating system for that matter - much to Microsoft's chagrin but probably to no ones surprise.

Plus, the latest statistics for one of the most popular web drive by attack hackers toolkits show that IE 8 users are getting infected at more easily than IE 7 users.

Crazy, but true, and not at all inconsistent with IE's mounting problems.  Not the least of which is that it takes forever to get critical security flaws fixed. Both the ones just hackers know about and the ones that everybody knows about and knows hackers have been exploiting for months.

So IE 8 was not the way to go in many respects. Trends do not look encouraging that IE 9 will avoid succumbing at a high rate too when exposed to modern web malware.  In fact, it looks like on that front, IE is deteriorating, not improving like your intuition claims it should.

The web is improving this year.  In fact, now it already has.

Windows zealots will hardly go screaming into the streets that "you cannot use HTML 5 unless you buy a Mac".  For one thing, it is not true.  For another thing, all the Microsoft sales execs would have coronaries if they heard that being shouted.

In fact, you have lots of options to experience, use, and develop HTML 5 web pages right now.  The fact Safari 5 runs on Windows and Macintosh both already is the first that leaps to mind.  Firefox 4 is coming along and the current release of Firefox 3.x also includes some of the major HTML 5 features.

Web pages these days already accommodate a different set of capabilities from different web browsers. There are tons of ways they go about this.  They usually do not pick all of them, but here are a few they usually pick one or more of to get the job done:

• JSP (for Java servers) or ASP (for proprietary Microsoft servers)
• SSI (server side includes for Apache web servers)
• brower/version sensing/sniffing of request headers and URI-rewrting
• custom DHTML (JavaScript code involved with making changes to the DOM)
• open source DHTML/Ajax frameworks like Dojo or libraries like jQuerry
• XSLT
• alternative CSS depending on which browser is used
• Java applets, JavaFX, Silverline, and Flash being used as components on the page

Now, obviously, the last category above is not HTML content.  So they prose a lot of problems from security standpoint, forward compatibility standpoint, web searching/indexing standpoint, archiving standpoint, copyright/licensing standpoint, etc.  So I think it should be used judiciously when it has to be used, and be accompanied with fallbacks. Or, actually, maybe be the "fallback of last resort" itself.

Flash, Java applets, Silverline, etc. all seem to strain the performance+reliability of the web browser and be the preferred way for hackers to break into a computer from web sites they have already infiltrated.  That is not to say they will not trick IE by putting the wrong type of content in an audio or video related HTML tag attribute and confuse the heck out of the browsers poorly integrated security manager.

But in general, the heavyweight components that are used to create RIA components are creating a big headache at the moment.  They were never more powerful and more dangerous, it seems.

Cross site scripting (XSS) is another longtime favorite way of cyber criminals to confuse any brand of browser.

JavaScript never envisioned web based distribution of information and scripts across different sties on the web, the way that Java does. So, it has been an awkward process to maintain backward capability while at the same time adding protection for users and flexibility for developers & publishers.  It is nice to see HTML 5 taking a standardized approach to securely interoperating scripts.