Lately there has been a lot of buzz with regards to Flash on the web. Apple is insistent about not allowing flash to run on it's iPad, iPhone or iPod devices and with good reasons. Flash Security issues and vulnerabilities, performance, and battery life are a few of the main reasons. That being said, I still think flash has its place, but if they don't do something to revamp the underlying flash core, they're going to be left behind.

Out of all of this comes some good news. Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Google have been diligently working hard to implement the HTML5 standards into their web browsers. HTML5 is the next generation markup language for the web. With the new standard comes new structured layouts, and tags that will help make Rich Interactive Applications less restrictive. Some of the features that have been added are a Canvas, Audio and Video tags, inline SVG, advanced form fields, drag and drop support, offline caching mode, and even local storage. This will give the designers more flexibility to make their designs prettier, and add a whole new layer of functionality.

Being a programmer, I'm excited about the local storage, page caching, SVG support, and all the other stuff that nobody will every really notice, but the push behind HTML5 right now is for the canvas support. The canvas allows dynamic graphics, graphs, grids, images, whatever you want to be drawn in realtime to the page. For the average person that wouldn't seem very exciting, but if you think in relation to how flash changed the face of website design back in 1999, you'll get an idea of the possiblities of this new technology.

There are people out there already creating games, drawing utilities, and other RIA using the canvas. Click here for some demos on how the canvas is being used, but note that you must be running an up-to-date browser that is not Internet Explorer.

Other features of interest include:

• Audio and Video tags. New browsers will be supporting internal video players so that there will be no need for extra browser plugins and will allow a seemless experience for all users no matter which operating system and web browser they use.
• Advanced form fields. Changing the way our web forms look and the limited input types that we've been stuck with since the early days of the world wide web, HTML5 attempts to make things easier with new slider controls, spinboxes and date pickers.
• Offline Caching. Technically, if used correctly, web applications can be cached by the browser. If you don't have internet access, and you need to use a custom built web app, it will still be accessible, and usable until you are able to go back online.
• Local Storage. This can work with offline caching, where you will be able to store data locally using the browsers default storage mechanism. Mozilla and Safari use SQLite to store information into a local sql database, but the web developer has the option of selecting how they want to store the data; either in a SQL DB format, or as local session variables.

Here is a nicely laid out image of the browser support for HTML5.

With HTML5 on the horizon, and a lot of people bashing Adobe about their inability to produce a streamlined, mobile version of their flash product, it will be an interesting time for web designers and multimedia developers everywhere.