> HTML5 will also help in building new features. One feature that the Gmail design team is now working on is the ability to drag files from the desktop into the browser.

Working on? I've been using this for the past few months, ever since I heard about it. One time I wanted to send an attachment on a machine without Firefox or Chrome. I didn't bother, because it would have taken too long for the value it would have added to the email.

It doesn't currently work with Safari.

"If the browser supports CSS3, Gmail will render the pages using these specifications, rather than its traditional approach of using the Document Object Model (DOM)."

Better go build a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP as well!

What do they mean by rendering in CSS3 instead of the DOM?

Maybe CSS-powered manipulations instead of using JS to manipulate the DOM directly? As in, tag it with a class and use CSS to animate + hide + everything beyond that, instead of using a JS effects library.

* shrug * just guessing here.

>Currently, the Gmail program is comprised of 443,000 lines of JavaScript, with 978,000 lines if comments are included.

Interesting - more comments than actual code (535,000 lines vs 443,000 lines).

That's usually considered a good thing...

It's great that they're using HTML5 for their purposes, but unfortunately they still rank among the worst for supporting HTML in the actual emails. http://www.email-standards.org/

You can't even include background images in GMail.

"You can't even include background images in GMail." Thank goodness. The people who use background images in email where the background is a notebook paper or similar are troubling.

Yeah, really. I don't want that shit showing up in my inbox.

Why doesn't Google use GWT to write Gmail or any other applications? And how the hell does it maintain that many lines of JavaScript Code.

I believe that Gmail predates GWT.

I'd imagine that GWT also isn't as fast or compact as they'd like for Gmail.