This morning I read an interesting article about Google's plans to rely heavily on HTML5 for example in their web-based email service Gmail. It is not very surprising as HTML5 brings significant improvements for web application development. Also the rate how quickly browser makers have started to adopt this new standard has been a positive surprise.
HTML5 will not enable only easier development of cross-browser compatible web applications but will open up possibilities for completely new features such as offline storage. Also, we should see a much faster Gmail service in the future: Google's goal is to get Gmail to load in under a second.
Still, at least for me, the most impressive part of the article was the following fact: Currently, the Gmail program is comprised of 443,000 lines of hand-written JavaScript, with 978,000 lines if comments are included. That's a lot.