Form Follows Function. Image: Screenshot.

If you’ve been missing the early days of HTML5, back when experimentation, not stolid, functional sites was the name of the game, we’ve got a site for you: Form Follows Function.

Form Follows Function is a collection of interactive experiments built using HTML5 elements like Canvas and CSS 3 tools like 2-D/3-D transforms. Experiments include growing trees with the click of the mouse (or touch of a finger, depending on your device), dragging waves and 3-D cans of Campbell’s soup. Even the rotating menu of the experiments is impressive.

The site is the brainchild of developer Jongmin Kim, whose design work has previously garnered a Webby award.

Fun thought experiment: Imagine taking this site back in time, showing it to your 2002 self and then pointing out that it’s all built with web standards, no Flash involved.

While we really like Form Follows Function it does fall prey to the main reason we don’t really miss the early days of HTML5 and CSS 3 all that much — it doesn’t use CSS prefixes properly. Form Follow Function optimizes for Firefox and Chrome while ignoring Opera and Internet Explorer; a shame, considering how well done the rest of the site is.

This is Now New York. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

This is Now offers a real-time glimpse of life in cities around the world as seen by Instagram users.

The site pulls updates from photo sharing service Instagram and uses the image geo data to cull images by city. This is Now then streams photos as they’re uploaded, creating a photomosaic of each city. There are five cities represented at the moment — New York, Sydney, London, Tokyo and São Paulo.

If you’d like to see more images from a particular person, each photo links back to the photographer’s Instagram profile.

This is Now was build by developers Marcio Puga, Mauricio Massaia and Per Thoresson.

[Update: If you like This is Now, you may also like Fourist. Fourist is a similar project — aggregating Instagram photos by city — but focuses on photos from the weekend so you can peek in on what the rest of the world does on the weekend.