Musical experiments with HTML5

The Official Google blog has just announced an HTML5 Chrome Experiment in association with Canadian indie rock band, Arcade Fire. This experiment appears to function as a marketing exercise for both Chrome and Arcade Fire; although it does also demonstrate that Google has a commitment to HTML5 (and it appears to be part of a wider partnership with Arcade Fire, as the video below indicates).

HTML5 is still currently under development but is the next major revision of the HTML standard (as distinct from the recent incorporation of RDF, i.e. XHTML+RDFa). HTML5 will still be optimised for structuring and presenting content on the Web; however, it includes numerous new elements to better incorporate multimedia (which is currently heavily dependent on third party plug-ins), drag and drop functionality, improved support for semantic microdata, among many, many other things...

The Chrome Experiment entitled, 'The Wilderness Downtown', uses a variety of HTML5 building blocks. In their words:

"Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas."

Being an 'experiment' it can be a little over the top, and I suppose it isn't an accurate reflection of how HTML5 will be used in practice. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth checking out - and I was quite impressed with canvas. An HTML5 compliant browser is required, as well as some time (it took 7 minutes to load!!!).