Waiting for the Future

I look to the future where the browsers all support HTML5 and CSS3.

Having worked with Front-End development for most of my career, I have dealt with building sites with a multitude of designs. Mostly all of them have had different fonts, drop shadows, gradient colors, and rounded corners. Basically seeing this in a design meant taking the comp or PSD to Photoshop and spend several hours cutting images up to appropriate sizes, and spend more time coding up elements in order to pull off the design.

Also, displaying items like audio and video cross platform is still not very easy. You mostly have to buy, borrow, or develop a player, and add on particular elements for personal branding. Now, with mobile being an enormous and lucrative platform, using Flash as a platform is not an option anymore, and going back to the days of producing three copies of a video for every platform is still not appealing.

All of these headaches and frustration would for the most part, go away with the implementation of HTML5 and CSS3. As for CSS3, I can accomplish all of the items above and more without having to cut up a comp or extra code to pull off a design. As for HTML5, the new tags and functionality being handled by the browser with the specification solves a lot of problems with cross platform video and creating a simple player.

All of this is possible and everything would be perfect if most or all users used HTML5 and CSS3 supported browsers.

And that is where the problem lies.

Internet Explorer in any form does not support these new standards. A big blow to the standard. However, the upcoming release of IE9 will introduce this functionality to IE users. As for the other browsers, Happy to say that Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera support the new HTML and CSS draft standards. However the big debate lies within the format of video to use, This battle is between a licensed standard such as H264 and a relatively free open-licensed stander such as Ogg Theora. Hopefully that would be ironed out soon, because a settlement between this format alone would make these standards powerful and may propagate the switch to the platform.

To shave an hour or two off of development due to design elements would be wonderful and would help me focus on better functionality and IA elements. So my desire to see HTML5 and CSS3 as a standard would be wonderful.