Although I hate to appear like such a big geek, I’m excited about HTML 5. I’ve only read about a couple of the new features and I think it’s about a year away from being official, but I think it’s going to seriously change how web site work.

The new <video> tag is probably my favorite. The tag will allow you to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same ease of adding images. The video is encoded with the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs; they’re open source, no Flash, no Silverlight, no Quicktime, in fact no plug-ins necessary. As you may know, Firefox 3.5 will soon be available and it uses the new <video> tag. Webmonkey recently interviewed two Mozilla guys about the current status and future plans for the video codecs and the <video> tag. Once you download Firefox 3.5, go visit DailyMotion or the YouTube demo to see the future of online video for yourself.

Of course, there are other new tags that are part of the HTML 5 spec. Many are dry and boring but some of the others have a lot of potential. A recent article by Tim O’Reilly outlines many of the new features and discusses how Google is “betting big on HTML 5.” I myself look forward to checking out the <canvas> and <database> and I think the geolocation APIs will interest a number of the faculty over at UTSOA.

If you still haven’t had your fill, swing on by the html5gallery to check out hundreds of submittals all incorporating aspects of HTML 5. If I see anything super-cool over there,I’ll make sure I bring home a