Interoperability. My new favourite word.

in·ter·op·er·a·ble

–adjective 

capable of being used or operated reciprocally: interoperable weapons systems.

(taken from dictionary.com)

Currently I am researching my FYP and also struggling to put together a literary review so I have come across a number of different resources both online and in the library recently that are immensely interesting. Today I stumbled across Interoperability and was immediately intrigued. . . here was a word that promised interfaces that would be completely understood, that can work with other products or systems, present or future, without any implementation or restricted access. And where you might ask was I reading this lovely golden word??? Where else but W3 and its HTML5 Working Draft 13th January 2011.

I have read so much in the last year about the pros of html5 that to be honest at this stage I am a little over html5 already. In the most anticipatory way possible of course. But reading the working draft today was like getting a breathe of fresh air.. yes it is not yet practical to design in html5 yet (damn you IE) but we are definitely getting there.

The abstract from W3 reads “This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.”

As you scroll through the document you cant help but getting that same thrill you first did when you first heard about html5 its geolocation, canvas, audio and video are still as impressive as they ever were but I started to notice the little things as well the <a> tag is now block level so it can wrap around multiple elements and you can also add placeholder text to forms to that you no longer require complex javascript coding. When you couple html5 with CSS3 it seems like a truly unstoppable force and I for one am looking forward to greater interoperability.