We have heard a lot about HTML5 in last couple of weeks. Apple does not want to go with flash technology and are adopting HTML5 as the new standard.  Scribd has ditched flash in favor of HTML5.

Sounds pretty exciting huh !!

So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.

Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!

You do not want to land in this situation.

Aditya Yadav’s  interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.

The version of html which we are currently using is HTML and it has not seen a major update in last 10 years although there has been so much development in UI in terms of technology and browsers.

W3C is working on next major release of HTML , keeping in tunes with the times and has released a draft version. HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML

The technical difference can be read from here HTML 5

One of the most important features which I liked about HTML5 was its database specification . This lets a web application create and use a local database, which means it can work without an internet connection, and even more importantly, it’s way faster than before. HTML5 is supposed to be disruptive and is already being used in Google.

Google has demoed the new version of gmail which is in HTML5 . Click here to see the demo

Firefox 3.5 supports HTML 5 audio and video with Ogg Theora

HTMl5 would bring much more power to the web and to the developers who definitely would bring some innovative applications