google

Google is out in force promoting the new HTML 5.0 features, including tags for video and geolocation.

This was at the Google I/O developer conference held this week. They also announced a simple tool to add Google applications to a web page. The new feature is called Google Web Elements. The quick addition of Custom Search looks promising. Although technically, that isn’t hard to do now and I am sure there is limited styling etc with the web elements, but it is a nice feature for those folks with web sites who need a quick search option. Google also announced the general availability of Java within its App Engine, adding new capabilities to the Web browser. All in all a busy day of announcements.

Google announced a powerful message at this conference: the browser is the medium, not standalone apps. The most promising capabilities that have been added to HTML 5.0 were also discussed, such as canvas, video, and geolocation tags, plus the ability to cache apps and databases. Also, a “web worker” tag that allows for the background processing of Javascript, a tool to avoid taxing a Web browser by monopolizing its CPU cycles.

All very exciting stuff for sure. For a complete rundown of the features and integration, check it out here.