HTML 5 is not just for browsers anymore, at least not if you are Google. The search engine giant is going to use HTML 5 to render the content in its Gmail email service.
Google’s goal is to get Gmail to load in less than a second. Adam de Boor, a staff software engineer working on the Gmail project at Google, stated that he is excited by the prospects of the emerging HTML 5 specification, and that “We have things that we can do much more efficiently in HTML5. Speed is a feature.”
The Gmail service is currently comprised of 443,000 uncommented lines of JavaScript, all of it written by hand. “Most of the irritation around JavaScript comes from how it is implemented in browsers,” de Boor insisted.