Google Wave - What Does It Mean?

If you are a nerd, or a technology enthusiast, then you must have heard about Google Wave. I mean literally it was all across the web, from twitter to techcrunch (aren't they both the same?) Anyways, if somehow you missed it here is a video that you must watch.



So what is wave? why am I talking about it? While the demo itself is simply amazing and the application looks like the next generation of Gmail evolution, what excites me more than anything is behind the scene technology.

If you are a web developer you might remember those good old days of web, when Javascript was a "client-side validation" scripting thingy. Now with the new and upcoming HTML 5 and Javascript ECMAScript5 coming to almost all browsers, we are seeing a new powerful platform. One that can help us built really high quality web applications.

So what's all that special about HTML 5?

To get some context around this, let me recap what we currently use. Most of the websites (pretty much all of them) are currently on HTML 4 standard -- which is a decade old standard. Web has evolved therefore HTML standard needed to evolve too.

So HTML 5 is being developed since 2004 and so far it is still being specd out. Which means that it will change over the next year or so before it is finalized, but the guts are out there now.

I won't go into a lot of details about HTML5 in this post but would like to touch upon two things that really stood out for me:

1. Structure

How many times you have defined your HTML with class/id attributes structure it with header, footer, content, sidebar etc? HTML5 fixes this issue by providing new elements for representing each of these different sections. So elements like <header>, <nav>, <aside>, <article>, <footer> etc.

Makes it better for everyone to write and read the HTML code. Search engines can target your content and designers get to leverage it as well.

2. Video & Audio

We all have been embedding youtube videos for a while now. There is one in this blog post. HTML really didn't have any way to allow embedding video and audio content easily into a website. So people had to use flash. So now in HTML5 we have an <video> and <audio> tags. Along with DOM API to manipulate and interact with the video and audio.

There is a lot more to the story. I will write in more details about the upcoming Javascript changes and what it means to us web developers. I am truly excited at the possibilities that it will bring to the web.