Color me jaded, but the "excitement" about HTML5 is hardly ever about doing new things, it's about doing the same old things, but with different tools.
Almost every HTML5 demo I've seen just reproduces something we could already to with technologies that ran on the desktop years ago. We're supposed to be excited that we can now implement - barely, and extremely laboriously, and with a clunky, buggy, incompatibility-ridden toolkit - the same kinds of things desktop apps programmers have been doing for a long time.
As a web developer pushing 40, I dread seeing our profession head towards making desktop-style apps in the browser, and along way spending the next 10 years repeating the mistakes and relearning the lessons of current desktop app developers. I'm not sure I've got enough time left to stomach that.
However, I disagree that we should ignore the desktop UI in the browser. It's generally better than web UIs and there is no reason that we have to repeat the mistakes desktop UIs have made the in past.
Almost every HTML5 demo I've seen just reproduces something we could already to with technologies that ran on the desktop years ago. We're supposed to be excited that we can now implement - barely, and extremely laboriously, and with a clunky, buggy, incompatibility-ridden toolkit - the same kinds of things desktop apps programmers have been doing for a long time.
As a web developer pushing 40, I dread seeing our profession head towards making desktop-style apps in the browser, and along way spending the next 10 years repeating the mistakes and relearning the lessons of current desktop app developers. I'm not sure I've got enough time left to stomach that.