Web Standards

I'm starting to see a new wave of web standards which are coming into modern browsers like firefox and safari.
It's really good to see the capability of these standards in a real demo.
These are just some of the new standards:

• RDFa
• CSS3
• HTML5
• SVG

There are a number of benifits to users and developers which can come from these.
RDFa is used to put html elements in context, for example a persons name would be marked as such, and search engines can achieve results in a more faceted fashion.
CSS3 will cut down front end development time by offering features such as text shadows, rounded corners, image borders and better selectors.
HTML5 will provide support for audio and video, though it's still to be decided which codecs will be used. It also provides other benifits, there are a number of elements for specific sections of a page, such as nagivation and content elements.
Check out this demo of SVG combined with the new Video element.

While it's great to see these standards being implimented on Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome, I am worried that Microsoft will once again let us down.
They clearly have a conflict of interest with Silverlight.

Overall the outcome is bad for flash with more and more multimedia and visual effects able to be done without it.