As part of my fourth year at university I have to do a honours project and dissertation. The project has to be something big enough to warrant spending 4 months, yet not be too much for me to handle. I don’t know if this post will be all that interesting to anyone, but it will definitely help me outline my dissertation ideas so far.

I went through a bunch of ideas before deciding on one I wanted to do but from the start I knew I wanted to do something with HTML5 or CSS 3.0. The question I ended up choosing was:

“How is HTML5 going to enhance how people interact with websites?”

For the dissertation this will require me investigating current ways to implement some kind of interactivity into a website (i.e. JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, Java) and then look into how HTML5 will either enhance the implementation of the same kind of interactivity or if/how it can implement more interactivity.

From research so far I know pretty much what I am going to be writing about in the dissertation, or most of what I am going to write about anyway. A few things I want to cover are: the new tags in HTML5 that will help simple interactivity (<audio> and <video>, probably <canvas> too), examples of enhancing interactivity in HTML5 including native drag and drop and the canvas/audio experiment by 9elements (note: must have a HTML5 enabled browser to view – the newest version of Firefox will work fine), and why it is better than current technology (i.e. Flash, Java, Silverlight which all need plug-ins to view – HTML5 doesn’t).

There are plenty of examples of HTML5′s increased interactivity for me to research and use in my dissertation which is partly why I chose this subject (the other main reason being that it’s something that really interests me and I want to learn a lot more about) so that isn’t really something I am worried about. Finding journal articles to reference might be harder, but it is a new subject and so I hopefully won’t be penalised for not using a lot of them (although I’m sure there are lots on current interactivity that I could relate to the dissertation).

The main worry I have is what I am going to do for a project relating to the question. It will make a good dissertation subject, but I want a good project to do as well. Creating something like the canvas experiment by 9elements would be amazing, but I think that wouldn’t be feasible in the time-frame I have, and I would have to come up with a good idea that hasn’t been done before, or put my own unique twist on something that has been done before. I wouldn’t just want to create a website (I know, I’m doing a web design course and that is probably what I should be doing…) because thats simple and I’m sure the university assumes I can do that already (as they have taught us how to for the past 3 years…). Any suggestions on that front would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Nick

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