Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc) from the Yahoo! Developer Network has been on unmatchedstyle before, giving us updates on Yahoo! and their developer group’s projects and new product updates. We had him in town for our ConvergeSE conference and were able to sit down with him and discuss some important topics concerning HTML5.

Jason started off asking him about the differences between HTML4 & HTML5. Mainly the new tags HTML5 is introducing and integration with more up to date web production standards, things like the header, footer tag, etc… The other vast improvement is in HTML Forms. There’s a big list of form tags that are available to you as form inputs, like datepicker, color picker, etc… No longer do you need to use javascript for these types of inputs, it’s all browser based. Hopefully the browser makers will fully embrace the spec!

The other HUGE impact of HTML5 is going to be the video player, the ability to embed video without having to rely on a flash player is very exciting.

Talking about the three major areas that all this impacts, Video, Audio & Fonts – we may be in for three separate browser war scenarios. There are work-arounds, such as with Fonts, you can use @font-face or other 3rd party embedding systems. Same goes for Video with the flash player vs. the HTML5 player.

Jonathan helps us dissect some of the new major video codecs such as H.264, Ogg-Theora & Google’s VP8 codec. This leads the discussion to the Web M project, supported by a host of open source friendly web companies such as Google, Mozilla. In fact Google has released the code in it’s entirety.

The other huge impact of HTML5 is local storage, the ability to store data on your computer offline for when you go back online to be updated or released back into the “cloud” is going to eventually have a major impact on web apps. Think about Gmail and how this impacts that…

Diving into Canvas, it seems like this is a real effort to replace Flash (in some way.) Though maybe not until IE can catch up with it, but generally the consensus is that most browsers will eventually catch up and embrace things like Canvas. Now we’re not saying this will indeed replace Flash, Flash devs will always build things in Flash. Only that we’re getting closer to being able to use truly appropriate technologies for where we need them. An example here is using Flash/Cufon for Fonts vs. using something like @font-face.

Summing up this discussion it seems that the true impact with something like Canvas in your browser is true hardware acceleration for animation, unlike say Flash on the Mac or Linux platforms. This isn’t the case with browser makers.

This was a great discussion between two developers covering a lot of topics all relating to the impacts of HTML5. As always it was great to have Jonathan with us, we always leave talks with him with some truly great insight. Thank you Jonathan!