April 2011 article in the McKinsey Quarterly about the promise of HTML5.
Remember the early days of the Internet when Microsoft stole the browser market from Netscape? For designers and IT shops, there was a silver lining – market dominance by Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) simplified the Internet development process. By coding and testing on IE (essentially one browser platform), you were covering nearly all, if not all, your end users.
Even with the surge in popularity of FireFox, Google Chrome and Apple/Mac Safari, Microsoft still commands the largest share of the desktop browser market (See related article at ZDNet, 2 March 2011 – click on the graph below). And, if you combine the top three browsers for your design and development efforts you capture 89% of the desktop market.
Enter the mobile era. Gone are the days of one browser platform, or for that matter three or four browsers. Mobile changes everything. And as a result, the whole design, development and content management processes for deploying applications to the Web – desktop and mobile – are in complete disarray. For example, the tools to launch an application on the iPhone are different from doing so on an Android or Blackberry.
Let say you have a retail store with a Web presence and want to launch a mobile site. Simply re-designing your site for a smaller screen size (mobile web browser) is not enough if you want to take advantage of certain features on smart phones or if you want to be in the Apple iTunes Store (a great place to help drive awareness of your brand). Given few options to cover the big three (iPhone, Android and Blackberry), most people target the iPhone due to its popularity and wow factor. Obviously that’s great for Apple fans but not so much for the Google fans and BlackBerry enterprise users out there. What is one to do?
As the McKinsey article states, HTML5, a relatively new Web programming standard, offers some hope to streamline design, development and content processes across many platforms – desktop, mobile and even tablets like the iPad. However, HTML5 is nascent and certainly no panacea.
Click here to read the McKinsey article and let me know what you think about the future of HTML5.
