HTML5 Please - Use the new and shiny responsibly - 0 views
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Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 12HTML5 app development resource and advice site. Same people who did the excellent CSS3 Please site.
Not long ago, Mozilla coders announced that they were starting to build PDF.js, a way to display Acrobat documents in the browser using pure web code. No longer will you have to fight with an external PDF plug-in in Firefox. Huzzah!
Development on PDF.js has progressed to the point now where you can take an early peek at it. The restart-free add-on is available from the GitHub repository — just download the .XPI in Firefox and click to install.
the purpose of the HTML5 test suite is to help vendors and developers ensure that HTML5 applications work across all browsers. For example, a developer might check the test results before enabling a certain feature in an application, just to make sure it will work across IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
Developers can build HTML5 applications today, but they have to keep in mind that they are early adopters and act accordingly, Le Hegaret says.
"If you think HTML5 is perfectly stable today and you can use it without worrying about interoperability issues, I think you're going to fool yourself," he says.
Although the first round of HTML5 tests focused on desktop browsers, Le Hegaret says HTML5 compatibility is advancing more rapidly on mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids.
The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.
Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to be finalised. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months.
The W3C tests — available here — put IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by the Firefox 4 beta 6, Google Chrome 7, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5":
But there were plenty of mentions of HTML 5 and Microsoft’s commitment to that technology, not only in the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, but also as the glue “facilitating a level of independence and innovation between the back end and the front end” (as CEO Steve Ballmer said during an October 28 keynote address at the PDC).
So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?