HTML5! The next generation of HTML

Current browser applications have gone through a phenomenal change. The demand for the market to have richer client has pushed applications like Silverlight, Flash, Java Applets etc. onto the browsers.

However, HTML is still a base for most of the Web Applications (including SharePoint), when it comes to support for all browsers. In order to reduce the dependency of such third party plugins, it was necessary to add more controls into the HTML vocabulary.

HTML5 is still a work in progress. However, most modern browsers have some HTML5 support. Sadly, it is not supported on IE8

One particular thing interested me in HTML5. It’s capability to store data in the client.
It offers two new methods for storing data on the client:
• localStorage - stores data with no time limit
• sessionStorage - stores data for one session

Earlier, cookies were used to store data. It only stored limited information that represents the user. In most cases just a sessionID was stored in Cookie while the actual data was stored in Sessions at Server. The reason of doing that was to reduce the overhead of passing the data between the client and server for every request.

In HTML5, the data do not have to be passed on by every server request, but used ONLY when required. It is possible to store large amounts of data without affecting the website's performance.

The data is stored in different areas for different websites, and a website can only access data stored by it.

I am sure this will open the doors for a lot of offline capabilities of the web sites.