eCommerce Analytics

Lookout! HTML5 is coming! If you keep an eye on Twitter and tech blogs it may seem as if the whole world is talking about HTML5. Recently the chatter has gotten louder with the introduction of Google Wave (which relies heavily upon HTML5) and YouTube’s new beta support for it. But what does it mean for eCommerce?

Background

We’ve always pushed the Web to do more than it was designed to do. What began as a way to simply link text documents together has become a platform for shopping, chatting, watching videos, and kitten cuteness battles. In large part, this is thanks to additional functionality provided by 3rd party plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

HTML5 is a new standard that aims (among other things) to add native browser support for video, audio, location reporting, and new forms of user interaction that are currently the domain of 3rd party plug-ins.

How Far Away Are We From HTML5?

The group responsible for the creation of the HTML5 specification is called, for real, WHATWG. WHATWG began work on HTML5 in 2004 and expects HTML5 to be adopted as a W3C Recommendation in 2022. I originally had joke dates written to drive home how long this process takes but then I realized it’s funny enough without me having to punch it up.

In practice, though, HTML5 is starting to become a reality. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, as well as niche browsers like Opera and Chrome, have already implemented partial support. It will be years, however, before HTML5 is supported as universally as current technologies like Flash.

Booooring. Get to the Point.

Let’s take a quick ride through some new features of HTML5 and how they will impact eCommerce:

Medium Impact Features

Video. This is the money feature of HTML5. This feature is WHATWG’s way of saying, “Beat it, Adobe, we don’t need Flash for video anymore.” But with 99.7% of browsers supporting Flash you’re safe to continue using Flash video for quite some time. There is one exception to this rule: you may want to consider using HTML5 video if mobile is a big part of your eCommerce strategy since the iPhone and iPad do not support Flash.

Geolocation. Browsers can now report a user’s location by passing along latitude and longitude information to your site. We can kind of already do this for computer users by using IP location lookups but now we can get the location of mobile device users, too. If technical innovation is a core strength of your company and mobile is part of the strategy you can probably find some interesting things to do with this functionality. If not, sit back and let your ad network, analytics software, and recommendation engine take the lead on using this new capability.

Low Impact Features

Canvas Drawing. Have you ever wanted to add interactive or dynamic graphic elements to your site? If so, you probably used Flash. You can safely keep doing that unless you’re desperate to provide the same functionality to iPhone users.

Semantics. Lots of the div tags used for page layout now have special names. But they don’t have to have special names. Eventually using the special names may have some SEO impact but not for a long, long time.

Drag and Drop Anything. Imagine if shoppers could drag any element of your site or their browser onto any browser surface! Yeah, we couldn’t come up with anything either. Someone will find something cool to do with this but it doesn’t have to be you.

Offline Storage. Websites can now store data offline within the browser itself to speed up functionality or improve usability when internet access is not available. If you think this sounds similar to cookies you’re right. The difference is that this capability is more robust and “databasey” than cookies are. While great for email and other web apps, there’s not much going on here that affects eCommerce.

Where Are the High Impact Items?

Exactly. It will take years for HTML5 compatible browsers to gain the same market penetration that technologies like Flash and Silverlight have. If you don’t need to show video or provide interactive functionality to iPhone or iPad users then don’t spend another second worrying about HTML5. What you’ve got now is perfect.

Do you think we’re totally off base on this one? Let us have it in the comments.