How HTML5 Grew in 2011: In Developers' and Users' Eyes

As 2011 winds down, and HTML5 inches closer to official 'completion' (though plenty of HTML5 standards have made their way into browsers already), now is a great time to look back at the last twelve months of web technology development.

Two reviews of HTML5 in 2011 were recently published online: one emphasizing the development of the standard itself, the other spotlighting prominent and particularly impressive cases of innovative adoption.

• Oli Studholme's '2011 in review: 20 HTML5 sites that changed the game' lists sites of primary interest to web developers -- either because they present the new standards particularly well, or because they use new web technologies in amazingly clever ways. Oli describes his review like this:

On the content side, it’s really felt like 2011 has been the year the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web stack has come of age. HTML5 is now the default for most developers, and impressive explorations of the new features HTML5 makes available have been coming thick and fast. Here’s a tiny sampling of some sites that rocked HTML5 this year. Quite a few of them made my jaw drop with the feeling “I can’t believe this is the native web”.

This list includes a lot more than Canvas, including some applications of specs (WebGL, WebRTC) on the relatively far horizon of adoption. Check it out for the more deeply technical HTML5 sweetnesses of 2011.

 

• eBiz MBA's 'Top 10 Best HTML5 Websites of 2011' looks at the year in emerging web technology from the other end, from the user's perspective, describing their selection criteria as follows:

Here are our editor's picks for the Top 10 Best HTML5 Websites of 2011 based on visual artistry, integrated sound, ease of use, and uniqueness.

From a technical point of view, these are mostly Canvas-based; but all of them use code-drawn imagery to significantly different UX ends. Review this list for the more clever, less deeply technical uses of HTML5 in 2011.

These lists are deliberately short and incomplete, of course, so there's plenty more HTML5 excellence to celebrate this year. Do you have a favorite HTML5 (or other emerging web technology) site from 2011?