Google Gives Support To HTML 5

HTML 5, the newest version of the foundational mark-up language upon which most of the web is built, was the focus of Google Vice President of engineering Vic Gundotra’s keynote presentation Wednesday morning. It was at Google I/O, Google’s developer conference at the Moscone Center this week in San Francisco.

While still in the draft-specification stage at the W3C (the governing body of the Internet), HTML 5 is being tried out as both experimental demos and as the technology behind the current generation of web apps. As a display of the wide ranging functionality of the new technology, Gundotra showed several demos during his presentation. The demos focused on areas that Google sees the greatest potential, such as canvas, video, web workers, geolocation, app cache and database access. Also suppoting some, but not all HTML aspects are the latest versions of the mobile Android browser and the forthcoming Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone.

The support by Google of such technology makes sense for a company like Google that is looking to help speed up web apps, as well as improve their quality and usefulness. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been playing its hand a bit more cautiously in the latest version of Internet Explorer. The company has, however, experimental geolocation support, while leaving out support for HTML 5 video playback, canvas, or other web workers. Microsoft defended its actions, with its stated belief that for them to build support for untested technologies into its browser would be an unwise, risky move. Microsoft has pledged support for HTML 5 in the future, but may run the risk of landing a spot far behind the companies which choose to innovate and helping to test the latest capabilities.