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The Internet Goes Technicolor

Posted January 25 by Robbie Byrd in Business of Business, Media, Technology

While the Internet itself may have passed the 40-year mark late last year, it's most popular application, the World Wide Web, is only half that age. And in 20 years the "web," as it is collectively known, has been the source of more world-changing phenomenon since the invention of fire and Phil Spector's hair.

The web began simply enough in 1990 when Sir Tim Berners Lee, the much-worshipped demigod of the web, created the first web browser and web server at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In less than 5 years, the number of web servers on the Internet topped over 100,000.

At the heart of the web lies a simple programming language known as HTML. Designed from the start to be nothing more than a text-based research tool for high-energy physicists, like many great research projects before it has been snagged up by the masses and commercialized—into the world's most advanced delivery system for pornography and gossip. But before TMZ.com and whitehouse.com, the early Internet was the stuff nerds dreamt of: no loud colors or flashing text, no obnoxious video or music, and hardly any images.

But today, the web is made on images, video, colors and even obnoxious music. And poor HTML has been strained to its maximum trying to keep up with the pace of a daily-changing web. Inventions such as Flash and Javascript have helped, but have created their own set of problems and intricacies.

Hopefully, all that is soon changing. With a recent milestone, the future of HTML—HTML 5—is headed to a web browser near you.

With simplified media integration, downloading the latest update to a plugin will, in theory, be a thing of the past. New animation and drawing techniques are also expected with the HTML 5 release, as well as a lot of very nerdy features that make web developers weak in the knees.

Some browsers, including Apple's Safari and Google Chrome, have already implemented sections of the HTML 5 specification, and some well-known sites are already launching beta programs for these browsers. One of the most exciting is YouTube, which launched it's Feather beta project using the new media tools in HTML 5.

One of the more exciting—and geeky—features in HTML 5 is offline storage. This is exciting because many web applications, such as Google's Gmail or Facebook, can use offline storage to keep a local copy of some data. Not only will this speed up the loading of pages, but in the event a website is down (which is a somewhat common occurence with Gmail) the website will still be somewhat functional. The much bemoaned cookie will too, we hope, finally get the death it so long ago deserved.

Many other advancements—such as easier font embedding and communication between two or more open web pages—don't have any immediate benefit to the casual web surfer, rest assured it will make the nerds happy. And—as anyone who ever had computer troubles will tell you—when the nerds are happy, you are happy.

The nerds at MDi—you know, the ones who keep preaching about the importance of social media—are viewing this upgrade to the medium to be not so different from the day TV went from black-and-white to color. We're all about to get a bigger box of crayons.