Gone are the days of dwelling in Yahoo! or IRC chatrooms for those that did not want to pay subscription to AOL service. I always thought AOL sucked. It feels so naiive and innocent if I think about the web back in the day circa 1995. Set up an account at one of the many free hosting sites such as Geocities, Angelfire or Tripod and create a personal homepage. Add some cool images, create some pages about myself, add several links, obtain a cgi-bin guest book and find other people who were similar and start a web ring.
The web today is much more complex with so many different languages from programming to databases. With introduction of HTML 5 on the horizon, CSS3 being supported by multiple browsers, and jQuery/AJAX for online applications; things are definitely getting very interesting. Too many things to learn and the constantly evolving internet standards makes it difficult to be a complete master of this art or relegate one to the status of guru.
I miss the simplistic days when it was a feat to just embed a couple midi sound files and have a pop up player able to navigate different songs. Another one was to realize frames so navigation was quicker rather than constantly loading the navigation menu over and over again. Perhaps I was much younger and had the patience and diligence to trudge through lines and lines of arbitrary code.
I can’t help but think it was simpler back then. (Is there a cache some where on the internet that exists my old homepages I built?)
Here are a couple things to look forward to with HTML 5:
- Ability to offer a more organized structure with tags such as <article>, <section>, <footer>,<nav>, etc.
- Rather than embed audio or video sources there is a new tag appropriately like the image tag. The <video> or <audio> tags will be used similar to the <img> tag we have become accustom to for images. Does this doom Flash? They explain it much better than I do but here is a demo using HTMl 5.
- Much better support for database connections so many tasks can be cached locally by the browser, similar to Gears by Google.
- Formatting elements such as frames may be removed because CSS may be better suited to support it.
Just to name a few of the direction HTML development is moving towards. This will be a slow process because as always, new code, new tags, will also need browser support. Glad to see Mozilla’s Firefox browser supporting the <video> tags in action though.