responsive design — wherein publishers have the ability to design once for all platforms, and pages reconfigure themselves to display appropriately on a mobile phone, tablet, or a computer — HMTL5 also provides publishers the technological palette to create high- design work that takes the visual ethic of magazines to new levels in the mobile universe. The new standard supports video, offline reading, touch and gestural interaction - all functions that, until recently, were only available for mobile devices on native apps.
And it bypasses the traditional app stores
- and so escapes Apple’s iron grip and its cash registers. Thus, publishers regain control over the customer data and pricing of their content when consumed in tablets or smartphones.
Mashable’s Pam Horan outlines some additional reasons why HMTL5 is online publishing’s future:
1) Enhanced web development. HTML5
is said to be responsible for bringing the web back. Innovation is shifting from app- based mobile and gaming to web-based development and web applications that
HTML5 supports video, offline reading, touch and gestural interaction, only available to native apps, while bypassing app stores
will be “visually rich and lively.” 2) Streamlined development. Switching
to web-based development creates a more streamlined, and therefore richer, browsing experience. Not to mention reduced development costs.
3) Advertising benefits. HTML5 is a
dream for advertisers and marketers in that it enhances online ads by making them rich and scalable. Rich media display ads can be accessed across browsers and can be downloaded directly from an ad server.
So while VentureBeat predicts that, with
all of these benefits for publishers, HTML5 will defeat the native app in as little as two years, we have to ask: Why isn’t the future now?