I'm excited about HTML 5 and CSS 3.
I look forward to the learning the HTML 5 markup that will enable video production for the web. Many clients over the years have asked me to edit audio and video, and I have always edited and produced AV media in the Adobe Flash environment. But Flash has been unpredictable. Sometimes when I follow carefully an exact procedure using different video clips, I still get unpredictable and nonuseful results in the Flash output. The fact that Flash likes to putput its own HTML makes it awkward to position a Flash player precisely on a page. Many times, instead of obeying its own Autostart command, a Flash clip begins or pauses, of its own accord, when a web page loads. Very frustrating. An experienced Flash programmer can address these problems, but for better or worse I am not an experienced Flash programmer. And they are hard to recruit!
On the other hand I am pretty confident I will feel right at home with the new multimedia markup that HTML 5 offers.
I believe that if Adobe programmed Flash to use CPU resources sparingly, and if they allowed developers to easily control behavior and placement of Flash media in a web page, then Flash would continue to dominate web media even though it is a proprietary solution. Adobe has reacted to the emergence of HTML 5 with trepidation. For better or worse, Apple has made the business decision to remove Flash support from Apple products.
Adobe, I love your useful development products and have relied on them since the mid-nineties. But I hope you choose W3C web standards over proprietary Flash. The W3C exists and works for everybody. Apple, in choosing HTML 5 over Flash, is choosing open source web standards. I have to applaud.
CSS 3 offers refinements of CSS methods I have used for years, such as a revised syntax for selectors. The ability to use "wildcard" characters to apply values to whole groups of selectors will simplify many of the long, complex CSS documents that I have to build. The pseudo selectors look very interesting too. I have high hopes for the degree to which new browsers will support these CSS specifications.
I like the modular specification of CSS 3. Now developers can choose to program their code to use only specific, necessary modules of CSS 3. Developers do not have to account for the full CSS 3 specification. I really look forward to the web standard paged media, which provides for running headers and footers and page numbers -- as in print media. CSS 3 offers many other refinements that will make my daily coding more of a pleasure again rather than a chore. Stretching backgrounds, replacements for the DIV tag? I can't wait.
And, which browsers will support these new web standards, HTML 5 and CSS 3? It looks like MSIE 9 is a frontrunner to handle most output that HTML 5 and CSS 3 will throw at it. I wonder how MSIE 9 will perform on the acid test. I wonder how Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari will fare.
Maybe, with the emergence of these new web standards, the competing browsers can finally agree on the box model. Currently, the browsers disagree by a few pixels about the CSS box model. Come on, browser developers. Web developers and project managers count on you to agree on the standard. Those few pixels matter. Sometimes a few pixels can mean the difference between a satisfied client and a dissatisfied client.
I've addressed only a few basic ideas about HTML 5 and CSS 3. There's much more to know. You can start here:
HTML5.org
CSS3.info
W3C CSS3
W3C HTML 5