What aspect of HTML5 are *you* most excited about?

[Elisabeth Robson]

We've had some questions about HTML5, now it's time to turn it around on you: what are you most excited about in HTML5? Have any of you used HTML5 to build web applications? (By "HTML5" here I mean the newer features, including new elements, new CSS3 properties, and new JavaScript APIs).

Elisabeth

[Paul Clapham]

I haven't tried HTML5 for building web applications. I do that for work, and we aren't -- can't be -- early adopters of that sort. But what I think is the most positive feature of HTML5 is this: for whatever reasons, it has become a Big Deal™ in the web design community, and that is likely to make the browser developers work hard at implementing it. So once the project gets done, the amount of work we have to do to deal with different browsers should go way down. This should be standardization done right.

Of course that isn't going to happen for a few years yet. And we're still going to have people running old versions of IE until at least 2020. But still, it's a positive development.

[Bear Bibeault]

I think most people would say the video and audio components (and I'll admit to being a bit excited about the audio for games -- other uses of audio should be banned ), but what I'm really most excited about are the semantic elements that will allows us to create true HTML documents with semantic tags.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

+1 on the semantic tags
more built in form elements
ARIA (granted this isn't really HTML 5, but it became broadly usable around the same time)

[Karthik Shiraly]

I find the WebSockets feature interesting and want to try it out. I feel server being able to push data, without hacks like client polling, will make it convenient for developers to write webapps with richer features and interaction (that is, if Internet Explorer doesn't turn out to be a bad sport like in the past!).

[Elisabeth Robson]

Thanks to all for your replies, great to see what you're interested! Eric and I will be sure to write some blog posts on wickedlysmart.com about these topics.

Cheers!

Elisabeth