David Emery Online

The State of the Web

5 July 2009

Back a week or so ago at the lovely @media conference 3 main themes seemed to emerge, both from the presentations themselves and the hallway chatter:

Process, Font Embedding & HTML5

The focus on process I think is natural for an industry that’s reached a pretty high level of maturity. In fact, I think this level of maturity has reached out and touched every level of the conference – no longer are we having to evangelise new working practises (‘no tables for layout’ and the like) or share new layout techniques. We’re there. We’re done with the obvious.

Of course, there’s a highly debatable definition of ‘we’ in there – the battles, such that they are, are still to be fought but it certainly feels like the industry as a whole has moved on. Hence, the focus on ‘process’ and making sure that we’re doing what we do in the best way possible.

Hence also all the talk about font embedding and HTML5 – the new ‘exciting’ stuff. Font embedding right now though seems to be a potentially great tool that’s mired in legal and political issues. The short version: font foundries as yet don’t seem to be massively interested in sorting out a decent licensing model for embedded fonts, and it’s (sadly) probably going to take them a while (read: several years) to figure it out. Doubly sadly (that makes sense, doesn’t it?) Microsoft are one of the biggest foundries out there, and think that they already have a solution in EOT which no one else is going to implement. Useful.

God speed, TypeKit, god speed…

HTML5 though, luckily enough, is a little bit more useable. Right now, there’s a bunch of stuff that we can use (check this handy table for example) and it strikes me now is pretty much the time to start writing new sites in it (if only for the doctype). Having said that, I don’t think we’re quite ready to use the new elements (section, article, nav et al) quite yet ; you can’t style them in IE (even v8), and while there are JS hacks to make them work we can’t really rely on JS to that extent for most sites, can we? Especially when anecdotally it seems that IE has the highest percentage of no-JS usage (I guess due to security conscious corporate installs). You win some you lose some.

Firmly on the ‘lose some’ side is – sadly – the much vaunted video element, which deserves highlighting all by itself. It is, much like the aforementioned font embedding, a complete political mess. The video tag is supposed to provide a native way of displaying video in the browser (without the use of plugins like flash), but (as you can read in more depth here) it’s hit a complete impasse over codecs, with Firefox only supporting Ogg Theora and Safari supporting whatever Quicktime supports (which doesn’t include Theora).

Each have reasons for supporting what they support, but it renders what is one of the most interesting bits of HTML5 irrelevant. Sure, you can specify multiple files in the video tag and hence serve both Theora and h.264 but what content producer is really going to encode their videos twice – there’s absolutely no gain for doing it (especially when Flash has such high market penetration). This is reenforced by how difficult it is to work with Theora at the moment – just check out this article on about encoding files to it for an example.

It feels like things are picking up again in the web dev world. After a couple of years of relative stagnation we’re seeing some real steps forward appearing, no doubt spurred on by the rise in standards-based browsers and the increased competition in the browser space. Hopefully all of this political posturing which inevitably tags along doesn’t hold things back too much.