This tipical HTML can only display text with links and images.

You can change the size of the text.

Text

Text

Text

You can change the” font”, color and make it bold. That’s it! That’s pretty much all you can do with HTML.

To get around the the obvious limitations of HTML we start embeding computer language code in to our webpages to create rich content:

• First we found we could make art move.
  

• The next step would be to make an animation at does more than a loop. Shockwave gave us a richer experience by making the animation better and more interactive.
• Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) the creator of Shockwave later gave us an enhanced version of it called Flash and history was made.

Flash is great! It has created this huge market for online content like Youtube videos

While Macromedia and Youtube were doing their thing Google and other pioneers started creating online applications like Gmail and Google Docs (I’m not going through the list of Web 2.0 apps). These apps were created using programming languages.

Now we have or we will have HTML 5. It replaces the other programming languages by putting the functionality into the HTML itself. This makes the code smaller and faster. (In particular Flash is a pig. It eats up CPU cycles and Internet bandwidth!)

Turn on option to use HTML 5 on most videos on YouTube. Right now HTML5 is only supported in Chome, Safari, and IE with the Chrome Frame installed.  It does play in Firefox 3.6 Beta. Finished version to be released this spring.