I went to the The Chronicles of Web Standard III – The Voyage of the HTML5 presentation by Silicon Valley Web Builder last night. Here are some quick notes I took before my battery died.
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Please note: I am far from an expert on HTML5 and welcome any comments and/or corrections to the following notes.
The speakers were
- Ben Galbraith, Co-founder at Ajaxian.com
- Brad Neuberg, Developer at Google
- Chet Haase, Adobe Flex SDK team member
- Michael Carter, Founder at Orbited Project & Official Contributor for W3C HTML5
First off, HTML5 was defined as not just an HTML4+ spec. It also includes all of the advances since HTML4.0. These include:
- CSS3
- webGL
- geolocation
- web workers
- web storage
- web sockets
- canvas, SVG
Canvas vs. SVG
You can roughly think of these as Adobe Flash replacements.
Both canvas and SVG can be used to build dynamic images, charts, animation, and more. Canvas has more adoption at this point and is faster. However, the canvas is built and then keeps no memory of the objects it contains. SVG is more structured and knows what it contains. These sub objects can be further manipulated. SVG has the potential of being much more powerful than canvas in the long run. Microsoft‘s IE9 has demonstrated great potential with SVG.
CSS3 Advancements
There’s been an extended argument about where CSS or JS should be used on a web site. Some developers argue CSS shouldn’t be used for interactivity, such as drop down menus. However, the CSS transformations available in CSS3 are going to throw a major monkey wrench into this argument. They are blurring the boundaries and can do a much better job than javaScript.
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Clik here to view.
and Safari have pushed the development of transformations as they introduced the animation of pages when you switch an iPhone from portrait to landscape mode. This is just the tip of the iceberg. An example last night showed a CSS only version of itunes’ coverflow animation. Check out the CSS3 3D transformations.
Web Workers
Web workers technology should solve an existing problem with javaScript functions that run for extended periods. One example was a JS transformation of an image. It rotated the image and added reflections. However, the image would stop rotating when a user clicked on a button to add/change the functionality. Web Workers allows these functions to operate consistently.
There was another example with a movie of a guy holding a piece of cardboard and rotating it randomly. The user could click on various movies and watch them appear on the cardboard in the movie.
You can participate
One thing mentioned often in the meeting was the open structure for developing the specifications. Anyone can participate by joining the mailing lists, irc (irc.freenode whatwg), and making requests, suggestions, and comments.
They are especially interested in knowing what problems you have that are not solved by the existing specs. What changes would particularly affect you and how would you solve the problem.
For instance, I asked if the phone manufacturers are looking at the HTML5 web forms and using the new input types to intelligently autofill forms. For instance, they know an input is asking for a phone number, should a phone insert your number automatically? What about your other contact information?
Currently, this interaction is not in the spec. This is the kind of comment/suggestion they need to make the final specifications.
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