Hasta La Gadget!

Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!

Megan Fox is an obvious choice, for obvious reasons (if she’s your thing): She had a Motoblur, and we’re a gadget blog! See? Obvious. Anyway, tweeting from a tub on her new phone, she pondered what would happen if she sent a picture of her bathing out to the world. Hijinks ensued, people were hurt, and even a gay couple somehow got distracted by the fox that is Megan Fox:

And such is the power of Fox that there were scenes that didn’t make the final cut.

Then there was Beyonce, fresh off her Grammy performance, performing again for Vizio. Surrounded by Internet memes and celebrities, Twitter and what appeared to be an army of automobile assembly line robots (hopefully not ones from Toyota), she sang and sold that company’s Via/Internet Apps technology. Think Internet on your HDTV, not because I say so or because that’s exactly what it is, but because that’s the message Vizio assaulted viewers with during the 60-second clip:

Tough love was the story for Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot. The commercial was supposedly for Intel’s Core processor line, but I know the truth: Robot uprising. It 20 years’ time we can all look back at this commercial, when poor Jeffrey was snubbed For The Last Time by his human overlords:

Lastly, there’s one we actually covered yesterday. Google. Its poignant ad about a search-happy boy in love with a French girl aired yesterday, on the Internet, which is probably fitting. We’ll revisit it again here if you missed it tonight:

Sigh.

Personally, for me the ads were a bit stale this year. Even the Bud Light beer ads, which have made me laugh out loud on occasion in years past, felt a little tired. Betty White was a standout though, and there were back-to-back ads depicting grown men in their underwear. Possibly a first there. Also a first: Seeing a two-timing baby talk about eTrade while his “milk-a-holic” girl on the side blew up his shit over a webcam.

The one Bud Light ad I will give props to, however, was their Autotune bit. It’s a stretch including here on Gizmodo, but we have a history with that app (iPhone, anyone?), and we’ll take an opportunity here to thank Budweiser for hopefully killing the tech off for good with this Super Bowl ad:

OK, I admit it, I smiled a bit watching that a second time. Guilty.

The entire crop is over at YouTube in one convenient package (Fox’s is notably absent at the moment, although they appear to be updating throughout the night).

Like other substance addicts, tech-crazed geeks live in a state of denial. Let’s face it, if you’re reading Gizmodo, you’re probably addicted to technology to some degree. But just how addicted are you? Take this simple test to find out.

Answer each of the 50 questions below and give yourself one point per question you answer “yes” to. At the end, score yourself. Be honest, this is just for your own benefit… until you report your shocking score in comments, that is.

1. Do you eat most of your meals while at the computer or in front of the television?

2. Do you sometimes bring your laptop when you sit on the toilet?

3. Do you check your feeds more than 1x per hour?

4. Do you make a nervous habit out of refreshing your inbox over and over, just in case someone emailed you in the last 45 seconds?

5. Can you not remember the last time you didn’t check online reviews before eating at a new restaurant?

6. Do you freak out if you’re in a car and there’s no GPS?

7. Does the verb “tweet” come up regularly in your real-life conversations?

8. Have you ever changed vacation plans based on wi-fi availability?

9. Are there more than two portable electronic devices within reach right now?

10. If your house were on fire, would you run in to rescue your laptop?

11. Are you closer with some online-only friends than people you actually see in real life?

12. Are you pretty sure you’d have killed yourself if you lived in the days before Internet?

13. Do you buy things online that you could easily drive across town to get in person?

14. Do “electronics” have their own category in your monthly budget?

15. Are you a member of any sort of online “guild?”

16. Do you answer questions in support forums when you’re bored?

17. Do you bring your smartphone with you to church?

18. Do you own 3 or more video gaming systems? (Oh come on, portables count.)

19. Do you have multiple t-shirts with references to Internet memes, linux, or webcomics?

20. Do you know what the word “meme” means, for that matter?

21. Has your significant other (or mom, if applicable) ever banned you from your smartphone?

22. Do you spend more time on Facebook than you do in the presence of actual people?

23. Are you currently in a virtual relationship? (WOW, Second Life, etc)

24. Do you have 3 or more active social media accounts?

25. When something happens in your life, is your first thought usually “How can I fit this into 140 characters?”

26. Do you need multiple wall outlets to charge all your stuff at night?

27. When you sit down in a coffeeshop, do you tend to position yourself close to a power outlet “just in case”?

28. Do you generally spend most of your day looking at a computer screen and then go home… only to look at a computer screen for the rest of the night?

29. Have phrases like “BRB” and “ROFL” worked their way into your real vocabulary?

30. Do you often skip meals because you’ve lost track of time in front of the computer?

31. Do you call people by their screen names when you see them in real life?

32. Do you have more than five tabs open in your browser right now?

33. Are there more than three screens of some kind in the room you’re in right now?

34. Are there more computers in your house than there are people?

35. Do you tweet or read blogs while watching movies at home?

36. Do you put your phone on vibrate at the movie theater rather than turn it off, even though you’re not expecting anything important?

37. Have you ever turned down a romantic encounter in order to play video games?

38. Does your Internet usage cut into the time you should be spending on personal hygiene?

39. When you see the last names Cerf, Otellini, Ballmer and Berners-Lee, do you know who is being mentioned?

40. Do you ever leave your laptop open in social settings, even though you aren’t actually doing anything on it?

41. Have you ever had a dream where you were surfing the Internet?

42. Can you type text messages faster than you can handwrite the same words?

43. Have you ever left an event or date early so you could get online?

44. Would you classify yourself as an “expert” multitasker?

45. Can you read machine code?

46. Do you regularly have to put blocks of ice, portable fans, or frozen packages of hash browns on or near your computer to keep it cool?

47. Do you have carpal tunnel syndrome?

48. Do you keep multiple webcams around your house?

49. Are you up on the computer past 3am at least once a week?

50. Did you make it all the way to the end of this quiz?

Scores:

0-1: Clean as a Whistle – You are either 95 years old, or you lie compulsively to make yourself feel better about your internet addiction. Sorry to call you out like that.

2-9: Social Drinker – You’re not great with technology, but dabble. You probably play sports and actually have a significant other. Either that or you’ve recently been released from Internet rehab and haven’t slipped back to the old ways yet.

10-19: Coffee Fiend – You’re about as plugged in as the next person—but you gotta have your daily fix. Let’s face it, gadgets are everywhere nowadays, right? That’s what you tell yourself at least, but what you don’t know is everyone calls you “nerd breath” behind your back.

20-29: Chainsmoker – You recognize that you’re a little too plugged in, and you’re trying to quit. Your tech addictions are starting to ruin your social interactions, between signing out of the real world every 10 seconds and stinking up the room when you enter. Take this as your cue to shower.

30-39: Pothead – You’re addicted, but you have no desire to quit. There’s a box of Ho Hos on the desk, and you had to brush Cheeto dust off the keyboard to log into your computer, which you keep password protected with heavy encryption. You hurried through this quiz because your guild is waiting for you in the other window. You really should consider counseling.

40-49: Crackhead – You get all shaky when you think about technology, always searching for your next fix. You’ve considered constructing a biotech bathtub for your body to lie in, so you can plug your consciousness permanently into the Internet. Family members are planning to stage an intervention and check you into a clinic. You look forward to the shock therapy.

50: Permafried – There’s no higher brain activity going on anymore. Doctors should prescribe you video games and/or marijuana for medicinal purposes. Just to keep you from flat lining.

Based in New York City, Shane Snow is a graduate student in Digital Media at Columbia University and founder of Scordit.com. He’s fascinated with all things geeky, particularly social media and shiny gadgets he’ll never afford.

We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Felix, who would feel a lot better about his situation in life if he had one certain gadget that could do two certain things. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

I am looking for a NAS — 1TB would be good — preferably with WLAN built in, and multi-download BitTorrent capabilities are a must. I’d like a unit that doubles as a media streamer (music and videos), and while I’d prefer to stream over WiFi, I definitely need an HDMI port. If there’s an option with a display on the unit itself, I would love to know about it. Thanks for any input!

We know these multifaceted devices exist, but we also know they aren’t exactly everywhere. For those who’ve bought in, we’d love to hear about your experiences. Do you prefer yours? Are you disappointed with its performance? Don’t lead our man astray, okay?

Ask Engadget: Best NAS / media streamer combo device? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.

These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.

But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.

Making Phones Bigger

First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)

So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.

When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.

Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.

So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.

Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?

If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.

There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.

Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.

To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.

Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.

All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.

But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.

That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.

Shrinking PCs Down

Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)

What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:

There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.

HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.

Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.

Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach

Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.

Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.

We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.

What We Need Is a Third Approach

The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.

The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.

Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.

If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.

Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.

It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.

If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.

The beardier parts of the web-o-sphere have been abuzz about HTML5, the next version of the language that powers our internet. Will it revolutionize web apps? Will it kill Flash video? Will it fix our gimpy iPads? Yes… and no.

The tech press has transformed HTML5 from a quiet inevitability to an unlikely savior: When YouTube and Vimeo started testing it, it’s was invoked as a Flash-killer, and the emancipator of web video. When Google used it to design a new Google Voice web app, among others, it was framed as the murderer the of the OS-specific application. When the iPad was announced with no Flash support, HTML5 was immediately pegged as a salve, not to mention a way to get around the “closed system” of Apple’s App Store.

It doesn’t take much imagination to draw these stories into an appealing narrative about how the app-less, plugin-free, totally web-based future is just a browser update away. The thinking goes, somewhere in this impenetrable 125,000-word published standard, you’ll find the answer to the internet‘s every ailment: its clunky, proprietary plugins, its stunted web apps, its fundamental shortcomings as a platform for rich media. At the heart of each of these theories lies a grain of truth, but none of them are totally—or even mostly—true.

Here’s what’s really going on. HTML 5 is already working its way into the underpinnings of web apps you use every day, making them faster and more stable than those relying on Java or other plugins. They’re more like real apps. It’s helping us inch closer to the dream of having real applications available at all times, on any platform.

HTML is also setting forth a vision of media—specifically video—that doesn’t rely on crashy, resource-intensive proprietary plugins. Look in your plugins folder, you will probably see four video plugins at a minimum. HTML is a standard with an optimistic view of the future: You launch your browser, and whatever site you visit, whatever media you choose to play, your browser just magically supports it, without the frustration, confusion and added instability of a plug-in.

But at heart HTML is just a framework, a glimpse, and an ideal: Its real effect on the internet continues to be defined by the companies and web developers who choose to adopt its many pieces—and it is further shaped by those who don’t.

The Basics

Before we get into what HTML5 means, we have to talk about what it is, and to talk about what it is, we need to talk about what it’s built upon.

Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language underneath every web page you’ve ever been to. The language, along with its various complementary technologies (see: CSS, Javascript), has become immensely complex over the years, but the concept is simple. HTML is what turns this:

<u><em><strong><a href=”http://gizmodo.com”>Hello!</a></strong></em></u>

Into this:

Hello!

It’s basically a set of instructions that a website hands to a browser, which the browser then reads and converts into a formatted page, full of text, images, links and whatever else.

Here, try this: Right-click anywhere on this webpage, and click “View Page Source,” or “View Source,” or something to that effect. Your eyes will be assaulted with a wall of inscrutable text. You’ll see evidence of syntax, but your brain won’t be able to parse it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you will close the window. This, my friends, is HTML. But you probably already knew that, because it’s 2010, basic web languages are basically in our drinking water. So what’s this “5” business?

Somewhere in the central command center basement of the internet, there’s a group of guys who maintain the standard, or the rules, of HTML. In the case of HTML5, the buck stops with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), and to a lesser extent, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is through these independent standards organizations that new features are codified and presented to the public, and later—in theory—supported by various browsers, no matter what company is behind them.

In the early nineties, the W3C and a few influential torchbearers would collect various new web features thought up by different browser makers, publishing these standards with the hope that we didn’t end up with different internets for different browsers. By the mid to late nineties, the standards had grown in both size and stature, then serving as the de facto guide for browser makers and developers alike. (If this sounds a bit rosy, the reality was far grimmer—just ask any seasoned web developer about Internet Explorer, version 6 or earlier.)

Despite an occasionally rocky road, HTML standards went beyond being just a record of changes in web technology; eventually they became the blueprint to push them forward. Still, standards are guides, not laws, and no browser maker has to adopt each and every revision.

The last major revision of the HTML standard, version 4.01, was published in 1999. HTML5 hasn’t yet been formally codified, but it was born in 2004 and has been undergoing steady work and maintenance since. In the ’90s, HTML discussion centered around topics like font coloration, or tables, or buttons, or something more esoteric. Today, a new HTML version means deep-down support for the modern web, namely web apps and video.

The New Features

The HTML5 spec is more than just new tags and tools, but for users and developers, they’re what matter most. Specifically, I’m talking about APIs, or application programming interfaces. It’s because of these APIs (usually manifested as tags like <VIDEO> or <IMG>) that we’ll soon be treated to a richer internet. And it’s because of these APIs that when work on HTML5 started, it was called “Web Applications 1.0.” Today, if you pick apart HTML5, these are the biggest pieces:

• Video. If you watch video on the internet, you’re watching it through a plugin—a piece of software that works within your browser, but which isn’t technically a part of it. A decade ago, this plugin may have been clunky RealPlayer software, semi-reliable Windows Media Player controls, or a QuickTime plugin that you were better off skipping altogether. Today, it’s probably Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, or a newer, subtler Quicktime or Windows Media plugin. Whether you’re playing a YouTube movie embedded on a web page, or just viewing a .mov file as you download it, your browser has to use the plugin.

HTML5 includes support for a simple tag that lets developers embed video in a page just like they’d embed a JPEG or other image, with a pointer to a file on a server. Packed along with the ability to read that video tag are a few rendering engines, which would decode the video without any kind of plugin. Embedding a video with HTML5 is as easy as embedding an image, provided the video codec is compatible with the browser’s rendering engine. In terms of code, it can be as simple as this:

<video src=”video.mp4″ width=”320″ height=”240″></video>

Boom. Video. Here’s what some of the current rudimentary players look like:

–SublimeVideo (Safari 4, Chrome)
–YouTube (Safari 4, Chrome)
–Vimeo (Safari 4, Chrome)
–DailyMotion (Firefox, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)

In theory, eliminating the video plugins means no extra CPU overhead, fewer crashes, and wider compatibility—if HTML 5 video was standard now, we wouldn’t be stuck waiting for Adobe to port their plugin to our mobile phones, and Mac users wouldn’t bring their systems to a crawl every time they tried to watch a YouTube video in HD. As a general rule, playing a video file through an extra plugin like Flash is going to be slower, buggier, and more resource-intensive than playing it through a browser’s native decoder. That’s why people are excited about HTML5 video.

• Offline storage: Remember Google Gears? It was a set of plugins for various browsers that let web apps, like Gmail or Zoho Writer (an online text editor), store content locally on your computer, so they could behave more like native apps. Gmail, for example, could then work without an internet connection. It wouldn’t retrieve your new emails while offline, obviously, but it’d at least have a working interface and a database of your old emails, just like Outlook or Mail.app would. Well, Google abandoned Gears, because HTML5 basically supports the same thing, again, without a plugin.

-Here’s a basic demo (Firefox 3.6, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)
-And a more complex one, including lots of other tricks (Firefox 3.6, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)
-Or, try Gmail on your iPhone or Android phone

• Drag-and-Drop Elements, and Document Editing. You know how you can drag and drop emails in Gmail? And how you type into text boxes, to post or send everything from Tweets to emails to forums posts? As it stands, these systems are built on a delicate, complicated stack of ad-hoc code tricks, which have worked fine up until now, but which could stand to be simplified. Even if you’re not a developer, just know that this, in theory, translates to increased stability. And that’s exactly what HTML5 proposes: Super-simple implementations of editable documents boxes, drag-and-drop page elements, and drawing surfaces.

-A helpful, ugly demo(Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
-And an exceedingly pretty one(Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari

• Locations services. Now a web app can tell where you are, if you choose to let it. Here‘s how that works. (Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari 4, Opera, iPhone)

There’s a clear trend here. HTML5 is about video, and it’s about far more stable yet complex web apps. These are the sources of excitement right now, but they’re also the sources of confusion.

Hopes and Dreams

On the desktop, the transition to HTML5 will be largely seamless, though you’ll notice an uptick in the quality, speed and richness of some apps you use all the time—think webmail, document editors, and text entry applications for starters. On mobile, the results will definitely be more pronounced. Remember Google’s new Voice web app for the iPhone and Pre? Take away the browser controls, and it’s almost indistinguishable from a native app.

The hope—and it’s a realistic one—is that certain categories of web apps will supplant native apps. The advantages are obvious: If your document editor is online, it’ll work consistently whether you’re on an iPad or a Windows desktop; if your email client is a website, your messages are always available, and your read/unread status is always in sync. Web apps like Google Documents will get faster, more consistent, and more universally compatible. Still, you’re not going to see Photoshop or Final Cut in your browser window anytime soon. If this dream sounds familiar, it’s because it’s very old, and already realized in many ways: Ancient services like Hotmail mark its genesis, and the app-less Chrome OS is its eventual, if limited, endpoint.

The second dream, and the one you’ve probably been hearing the most about lately, is that HTML5 video could kill Flash. As in, render Adobe’s plugin, which most internet-connect computers already have installed, completely obsolete, simultaneously making Apple’s iPad and other mobile devices more capable of getting at all the media the web has to offer.

Vimeo, DailyMotion and YouTube (YouTube!) have all recently launched pilot programs for HTML5 video technology. On the surface this is very exciting. Their players are basic, but they work, and there are some rather spectacular demos of more advanced HTML5 video players doing the rounds right now. The latest builds of the WebKit rendering engine, which comprises the guts of both Mac OS and iPhone/iPad (mobile) Safari, Google’s Chrome OS, the Pre’s browser and the Android browser, among others, support full-screen HTML5 video. The iPad notoriously won’t ship with Flash, but Apple’s desktop (Mac OS) Safari is one of the first browsers to fully support the HTML5 video discussed here, the natively rendered video used by YouTube and Vimeo in their tests. So the stars are aligning for an HTML5 video takeover, right? No, they’re really not.

Managing Expectations

As I mentioned, the WHATWG and W3C can publish as many standards as they want, but in order for any to actually matter, browsers have to support them—and by browsers, I mean all major browsers, from nimble, rapidly-developed apps like Opera and Chrome to Internet Explorer, which, by the way, is still globally the most popular dashboard to the internet. Take the <VIDEO> tag as an example: Safari and Chrome do support it, both the HTML code and the native rendering of a couple of associated video formats. Firefox supports the tag, but doesn’t support decoding of the key video format currently used by YouTube and Vimeo. Internet Explorer doesn’t support it at all without a plugin, and isn’t the whole point of HTML5 to get rid of plugins?

Just as different browsers update their rendering engines at different speeds, users of browsers update their software even less predictably, and some don’t update at all. Despite Microsoft’s aggressive IE8 evangelism, IE6 was only just bumped from being the Number One browser in the world. It was released in 2001, when HTML 4 was just learning to walk and HTML5 was but a glint in the W3C’s eye. IE6 will never work with HTML5 video. But it plays video just fine with Flash.

Even on the cutting edge, there are serious roadblocks to widespread adoption of HTML5 video, the most dangerous being video codecs. Because HTML5 supports video embedding natively, browsers will have to be able to decode embedded video files in lieu of the plugin that use to do it for them. The current working HTML5 standard doesn’t explicitly define a video format to be used with the tag—and as luck would have it, there are now two formats vying for the job.

• Ogg Theora is a free codec standard—free as in open source—which most browsers that support HTML5 video support right now. It’s an attractive option on paper, because browser companies don’t have to pay any licensing fees to include the ability to decode it in their software. The trouble is, it’s notoriously inefficient, and, perhaps because of this, it’s not too popular. Google’s standards guru Chris DiBona infamously said:

If [YouTube] were to switch to Theora and maintain even a semblance of the current quality, it would take up most available bandwidth across the internet.

True or not, as a codec standard Ogg Theora isn’t gonna cut it, even though from a business point of view, it’s ideal.

• h.264 video suffers from pretty much the opposite situation. Based on a codec standard that’s natively supported in many mobile phones, it’s what Vimeo and YouTube are running in their respective experiments. These video sites’ already store their mobile-quality libraries in h.264—what do you think streams to your iPhone YouTube app, since Flash isn’t supported? So enabling h.264 streaming is as simple as developing a player interface, which takes no time and even less resources. It’s also efficient—that’s why it’s popular in the first place. One problem though: It’s proprietary.

Yes, if you want to build a browser that plays back h.264-based video with HTML5, you need to be prepared to pay millions of dollars to the companies that own the format’s patents. Beyond the basic cost issue, some deem it risky to put the internet’s entire video ecosystem into the hands of some obscure rightsholders, whose whims could change down the road. (Who, exactly? These guys!)

Google and Apple have so far been okay with the royalties, but Mozilla, creator of Firefox, is taking a more conservative longview. As Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard insists, there’s a precedent for these worries:

Because it’s still early in H.264’s lifespan it’s extremely advantageous to lightly enforce the patents in the patent pool. MP3 and GIF both prove that if you allow liberal licensing early in a technology’s lifespan, network effects create much more value down the road when you can change licenses to capture value created by delivering images and data in those formats. Basically wait for everyone to start using it and then make everyone pay down the road.

So, while h.264 is a shoo-in for the job, it would probably be unbelievably perilous to sign it up.

If this seems like a lot to digest, don’t worry! Despite the thousands of urgent words spilled on this subject, it doesn’t really matter. Flash is here for a while, because nobody can get their act together.

First let’s talk about DRM, a sore subject, but something you can’t not talk about. Flash video supports it. HTML5 video doesn’t, as it stands. Could you imagine a Hulu on which every video is a right-click away from saving to your computer? A Netflix where you keep what you stream? I mean, sure, you can imagine this, but there’s not enough Tums in Los Angeles for Hollywood execs to stomach that discussion. No DRM, no movies or TV shows. Simple as that. And if the fight over a basic HTML5 video standard is fraught, just imagine how tough it’d be to get Mozilla, Apple, Google, Opera and Microsoft to agree on DRM.

Meanwhile, the test runs show, in reality, how little weight is being thrown behind HTML5 video at the moment. This is how YouTube describes their HTML5 initiative, which caused such a fuss last week:

In the last year our community has made it clear that they want YouTube to do more with HTML5. To meet this demand we recently rolled out HTML5 support in TestTube, a destination on YouTube where we routinely experiment with different products. Some of the products in TestTube are successful and rolled out to the wider community. Others, however don’t make it beyond TestTube. We’re still in the early stages, but our hope is to continue this active and ongoing discussion around emerging Web standards.

Can you feel the enthusiasm? YouTube’s HTML5 test is just that, a test. There’s no convincing evidence of idealistic shift in the works. YouTube’s future hinges on the ability to integrate ads into their videos, to sell access to DRM’d content, and to reach the largest audience possible. Until HTML5 video can pull this off, Google and YouTube are going to keep on doing what they’ve been doing—using Flash.

Lastly, Adobe has interests in this discussion too, and is working frantically to push Flash to virtually all mobile smartphone platforms that don’t already have it. Meanwhile HTML video tag support on smartphones is barely the discussion phases—it’s plagued with as many problems, if not more, than desktop HTML 5 video.

And we haven’t even talked about the other holes in the HTML5 Murders Flash! narrative. What about the spec’s glaring lack of ability to replace Flash’s other, non-video functions? Sure, increasing browser support for scaled vector graphics and HTML5’s Canvas tag go a short way to creating vivid, visual web applications without plugins, as does the wide array of Javascript tools already available to web developers.

But what about games? And more importantly for developers who like paychecks, what about animated, interactive ads (some which are overlaid on the aforementioned YouTube videos)? The internet’s not going to give up on those anytime soon, and the non-Flash web technologies we have now aren’t going to cut it for years.

What’s Really Going to Happen to Your Internet

As I said way back at the beginning, part of the job of an HTML spec is to codify what’s already being done by developers and browser makers. As such, there’s a very good chance that HTML5 is partially supported by your desktop browser. If you have a smartphone with a WebKit-based browser, you already use web apps that leverage the technology. This will simply become more common, in a mundane, linear way: Google, Apple, WebKit, Mozilla, Opera, and yes, even Microsoft will continue to include new features in their software, and developers will begin to leverage it as soon as they can. Web apps will get smarter, faster and more powerful, even if you don’t really notice it. You’ll worry less about having a constant internet connection, and you’ll probably install few native applications on your phone or laptop.

For the foreseeable future, video on the internet is going to remain almost exactly as-is. If anything, Flash will become more entrenched in the short term, as the YouTubes and Hulus of the world expand their catalogs with more DRM’d content, and continue building their desktop content platforms around the plugin. As for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, for whom Flash seems eternally out of reach, video delivery will move increasingly toward apps, which content companies can tightly control, and not toward HTML5 video, which—all other problems aside—they really can’t.

HTML5 has a place in online video, and I expect companies to continue testing it, playing with it, and expanding their uses for it. I expect browsers to continue increasing support for it—hey, maybe even mobile Safari!—but don’t stake your hopes, or a specific gadget purchase, on its immediate promise. An internet where native web languages have killed all plugins, including Flash, is just too far away to talk about coherently.

HTML5 is infiltrating the web, not tearing it down and building it back up. Like the standard itself, the HTML5 web will evolve slowly, with web technologies gradually supplanting tools you use now. You’ll notice it, but you’ll have to watch closely.

Hat tip to Lifehacker, for noticing—and explaining—the groundswell all the way back in December

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