Should web businesses adjust their development plans for HTML 5?

Google Wave, the search engine’s dynamic new communication service, stole the show at the company’s Google I/O developer conference earlier this month. But any business with a web site should also be looking at something else Google spent time talking about: a new version of the HTML code used to build interfaces for any web site, HTML 5. This revised version will make it easier for sites to offer more dynamic interfaces to users. At the same time, it’s not yet clear how HTML 5 features might interfere with search indexing by Google and other search engines — developers need to make sure that pages on their sites will still appear on search results, and help their companies find more users.

Some HTML 5 features are already available on mobile browsers, and look for more on the new versions of the Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome web browsers. Others may take years to roll out. Here’s a short list of potentially useful features that are or will at some point be available:

• The Canvas tag offers a Javascript addressable drawing and rich interface layer, allowing for pixel level control
• The video tag native to HTML allows videos to be embedded in a page and be addressable by Javascript without requiring a plugin per video; this could allow multiple videos on a page to work more smoothly
• At some point in the future, a three-dimensional rendering engine native in the browser, enabling more powerful games and visualizations
• Native to the browser geolocation services
• Database and app caching enabling applications to run in the browser, but offline, which is particularly powerful for any user using a mobile device to access an application or web service
• Web Workers, which is more clearly the ability for a web page to run processes in the background; this is particularly useful for any application which needs to do some calculations to do so without impacting the user experience (the opposite is all too common on the web today).

Here’s some more detail from our event coverage, and a good post on the changes by Tim O’Reilly.

At the I/O conference panel on HTML 5, I asked Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra about the impact of HTML 5 and other advanced applications on Google’s ability to index and search webpages and web content more broadly. The short answer he gave is that while the company is investigating how to index web application content — perhaps via the careful deployment of web standards such as microformats — it sees the ongoing enhancement of the user experience and richer applications as a net benefit for Google. In my view, it is likely that content inside of these richer elements, such as HTML 5′s canvas tags, or an embedded WebElement application will not be indexed by Google or accessible by Google services such as AdSense.

Thus while I would suggest looking at these new features to enhance the experience of your website, I would still encourage and suggest that you leave core content in clean, standard HTML content so that it is indexable by Google and other search engines.

More broadly, for web startups and other web-related businesses, these changes imply questions that companies need to start asking themselves now. How should you plan and adjust for changing standards, many of which are driven by larger, more established corporations? What about other advanced services — what impact could the new Web Elements features from Google have on the usefulness and value of your website to your business? Should you reset or restart your development efforts to accommodate these new technologies? Should you rewrite your business plan to leverage services such as Google’s App Engine, which offer server scaling and other features? Many of these features could and should have an impact if your startup is developing an application or service to be delivered over the web. It is definitely worth watching the adoption of HTML 5 very closely starting now.

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