Google's I/O developer conference is underway in San Francisco and, though there are many announcements being made, the overall theme is HTML 5. The technology is still under development and Google's vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, made it the central point of his keynote presentation, focusing on what Google was doing to support HTML 5, which it believed to be the future of web.

HTML 5 has been in development for several years and it is still a few years away from becoming standardized. However, several browsers already support it in some form or another even though it is still in draft form. “HTML 5 offers us a chance to do things differently,” Gundotra said. HTML brings important features to the web and Gundotra and the other speakers at the conference went on to highlight some of the most significant of them.

Each element was accompanied by several demo runs on the browsers that currently support them. First the canvas element, a vector graphics engine that only uses HTML and JavaScript for dynamically generating bitmaps, was presented in three demos including a simple first-person shooter game. Then there was the video element, aimed at replacing the need for plug-ins for video playback. With it videos can be added to a webpage with a simple HTML tag, just like an image. The demo was a fully functional YouTube mockup playing video without using Flash. “The problem with video right now is that there’s too much outside of your control,” Gundotra says. “HTML 5 gives you a <video> tag that’s as simple to use as the <image> tag.”

The next feature he focused on was geolocation, demonstrating several uses for the technology. He said that most applications would be enhanced by using gelocation and especially emphasized its use in mobile phones. Application cache and database access is another important feature in HTML 5 allowing web apps to be faster by storing data locally. Gmail working while offline on an Android phone was the example presented for the use of app cache. 'Web workers' was the last feature to be presented, and it seems it allows applications to run in the background preventing the browser from locking up during intensive work.

You can run all of the demos yourself here if you have an HTML 5 capable browser. Google really believes in HTML 5 and is promoting it hard but it's easy to see why. Much of the search giant's business comes from web apps and it's in its best interest to support any technology that makes them run faster. Google I/O continues tomorrow.