Christian Heilmann, a self professed developer evangelist working for Mozilla, recently gave a talk at New Work City for MDN Hack Day. The 25-minute talk touches upon what the Web is and what Mozilla is doing to keep the Web open.
He opens the talk with a humorous anecdote on how people always associate Mozilla with Firefox. He wants to clarify that Mozilla is more than just Firefox and is making new technologies that keep the Web open. He uses the example of their technology that allows people in oppressed countries to upload human rights violation videos in small pieces over 3G networks from phones.
Heilmann touches upon HTML5 and what it means to the Internet. He says that the true advantage of HTML5 is that it runs natively on browsers. It doesn’t require users to download any kind of executable to run it.
In a humorous example, he shows a scene from Star Wars IV: A New Hope where he removes one of the suns from Tatooine’s sky in real time from the video in HTML5. He says that a trick like that would only be doable in Flash before, but HTML5 is a game changer.
Interestingly enough, he says that CSS with HTML5 will render Photoshop and its ilk obsolete. Image manipulation and all of its features, including image cropping, will be available in browsers in the near future.
He uses the example of a simple game to show off how HTML5 can allow for easy cross platform porting. He shows the same game running on a PC and on his Android phone. It can be controlled via mouse, keyboard or the accelerometer on the phone with no added effort.
One of the most amazing demos is when he uses the inspect element function to display a Web page and its layers in 3D. This allows developers to debug a page by inspecting each individual layer in a visual format.
The entire video is really fascinating and gives a good look at the future of the Web and HTML5. It helps that Heilmann is an entertaining speaker who uses plenty of jokes to keep viewers interested. Check it out and tell us what you think:
