About 14–15 years ago my uncle took me to the university at which he was studying at the time. He had something to show me. He sat me behind a computer in the computer room and started a program called “Netscape”. He typed in an internet address ending with `.au`. I saw my first website and it came all the way from the other side of the world. It looked like crap, loaded incredibly slow, but it was _cool_.
I could have never have guessed that HTTP, HTML, CSS and Javascript would once not become the main way to access information, but also replace a lot of desktop applications. The abilities of the new [HTML5](http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html) and other web technologies like [SVG](http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/) never cease to amaze me.
Here are 10 things I had not expected these open web technologies would be able to, but can in 2010:
1. [Interactively render physics of a cloth](http://www.andrew-hoyer.com/experiments/cloth)
2. [Live motion tracking](http://htmlfive.appspot.com/static/tracker1.html)
3. [Play YouTube videos without Flash](http://www.youtube.com/html5)
4. [Collaboratively edit source code in a browser IDE](https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/)
5. [Do weird interactive stuff like this](http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/)
6. [Animate simple 3D landscapes](http://sebleedelisle.com/demos/html5landscape.html)
7. [Read books in a mobile browser](http://m.ibisreader.com/), _while disconnected from the internet_
8. [Play Wolfenstein 3D](http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/650/step_4_enemies.htm)
9. [Play MarioKart](http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mariokart/)
10. [Render flash files using Javascript/SVG](http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/)
