Group items tagged

Excellent review of great HTML5 Web Sites.  Includes quick reviews of tools and developer services for HTML5, CSS3, Canvas/SVG, and JavaScript.  (No JSON :()  Includes sites offering tutorials and demonstrations of how advanced, even spectacular, HTML5 builds.  This is clearly the kind of resource anyone involved with advancing HTML5 would like to return to and reference as the Web pushes forward.  Good Stuff Oli!!!! "2012 in review: HTML5 Doctor Oli Studholme nominates the websites that made best use of HTML5 this year, including a range of useful developer tools and online resources Another year has flown by, bringing the requisite slew of major changes. HTML5 is on track to be a recommendation in 2014, with W3C appointing four new editors to manage the W3C's HTML5 spec and putting the HTML5 spec on GitHub; and WHATWG focusing on the HTML Living Standard. Responsive design and Twitter Bootstrap went mainstream, IE10 was released (along with seven versions of Chrome and Firefox), and browser support continues to improve. It's impossible to pick only 20 ground-breaking sites from the thousands that did truly advance our collective game, but here's my attempt. For convenience, I've grouped them according to the way in which they use HTML5."

Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser. I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done! The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components. It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine. excerpt: The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added. There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap

CSS is a simple, declarative language for creating style sheets that specify the rendering of HTML and other structured documents. This specification is part of level 3 of CSS ("CSS3") and contains features to describe layouts at a high level, meant for tasks such as the positioning and alignment of "widgets" in a graphical user interface or the layout grid for a page or a window, in particular when the desired visual order is different from the order of the elements in the source document. Other CSS3 modules contain properties to specify fonts, colors, text alignment, list numbering, tables, etc. The features in this module are described together for easier reading, but are usually not implemented as a group. CSS3 modules often depend on other modules or contain features for several media types. Implementers should look at the various "profiles" of CSS, which list consistent sets of features for each type of media.

Amazon releases a new version of the KF8 Format, with greatly improved HTML5-CSS3 capabilities.  Details of the KF8 spec can be found here: http://goo.gl/XY39v A couple of things i'm wondering about here.  One is, the KindleGen conversion tool can convert HTML, XHTML and EPUB to KF8.  Has anyone tried to push a OpenOffice XHTML compound document through this latest KF8 version of  KGen?  I'm thinking that perhaps the OOo HTML problem could be solved in this way? There is no doubt in my mind that HTML5 will continue to grow, and eventually replace the desktop XML "compound document" formats. The great transition from desktop client/server business productivity environments, where legacy compound documents rule the roost and fuel the engines of all business systems, to a Cloud Productivity Platform, will require an HTML5 compound document format model.  Also needed will be HTML5 capable applications participating in the production of Cloud ready compound documents.  Is KF8 a reasonable starting place? excerpt: Kindle Format 8 is Amazon's next generation file format offering a wide range of new features and enhancements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support that publishers can use to create all types of books. KF8 adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including drop caps, numbered lists, fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics - opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love. Kindle Fire is the first Kindle device to support KF8 - in the coming months KF8 will be rolled out to our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices as well as our free Kindle reading apps.

The history of HTML from it's earliest days to HTML5, by Mark Pilgrim.  Wonderful stuff, beautifully written.  Excellent introduction to the HTML5 category of Open Web technologies ( HTML5, CSS3, SVG, JavaScript and the Open WEB API's) excerpt quote: Implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. You don't want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification. However, you also don't want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback. There is unavoidable tension here, but we just have to muddle on through.

Chrome runs as close as any browser can to the bleeding edge of Web standards. Though it uses the same open source WebKit rendering engine as Safari, it doesn't reliably support the controversial, proprietary CSS3 transformation and animation tricks that Apple's built into Safari. However, like every browser I tested, it earned a perfect score in a compatibility test for CSS3 selectors, and it joined Safari and Opera with a flawless score of 100 in the Acid3 web standards benchmark. Chrome 5 also supports both Apple's H.264 codec and Mozilla's preferred open source Ogg Theora technology for plugin-free HTML5 video, and it beautifully played back HTML5 demo videos from YouTube and Brightcove. In XHTML and CSS tests, Chrome was surprisingly slower than Safari, despite their shared rendering engine -- but the race was close. Safari rendered a local XHTML test page in 0.58 seconds to Chrome's 0.78 seconds, and a local CSS test page in 33 milliseconds to Chrome's 51 milliseconds. Note that Chrome still rendered XHTML more than twice as fast as Opera (1.67 seconds) and left Firefox (12.42 seconds--no, that's not a typo) eating its dust. In CSS, it also beat the pants off Opera (193 milliseconds) and Firefox (342 milliseconds). But Chrome shines brightest when handling JavaScript. Its V8 engine zipped through the SunSpider Javascript benchmark in 448.6 milliseconds, narrowly beating Opera's 485.8 milliseconds, and absolutely plastering Firefox's 1,161.4 milliseconds. However, Safari 5's time of 376.3 miliseconds in the SunSpider test beat Chrome 5 handily.

Modernizr is a new library that detects various HTML5 and CSS3 features and lets you know so you can use them: Enables the writing of conditional CSS and conditional JavaScript! The JS tools just keep coming.

Jonathan Deutsch and Ryan Nielsen left Apple late last year to join Y Combinator's accelerator program and help designers build animations in HTML5 as opposed to Flash. Friday, the two-man team is releasing Hype, the first product of their startup Tumult, on the Mac App Store. Hype, which sells for $29.99, uses WebKit to render pages and has been crafted so that anyone comfortable with using Keynote or PowerPoint can start building animations in HTML5, no code required. "It's pretty clear that HTML5 is the future of the web," says Deutsch. "It will, of course, run not only on desktop machines but also runs really well on any modern smartphone or tablet like the iPad. The problem is that there are no good designer apps for creating animated HTML5 like there are for Flash." Hype presents the user with a blank canvas with a timeline at the bottom. The user can then drag in images, video and text, arrange those elements and use keyframe-based animations to define where those pieces of content go.

Return to the bad old days Many of Apple's demos rely on "experimental" CSS3 properties to work. The exact implementation of these properties has yet to be hammered out, so browser vendors must use their best guess to determine how they should be rendered onscreen. Because of the ambiguity this introduces, it is the custom for browser vendors to attach a vendor-specific prefix to the CSS property names. Firefox uses "moz," while Safari uses "webkit," named for the browser's WebKit rendering engine. This means Web developers who want to use a specific experimental CSS feature must include the vendor-specific properties for each browser they want to support in their style sheets. It's a less than ideal situation, but the actual coding required is trivial. Apple chose not to bother for its HTML5 demo site. That would be bad enough. But Apple's demos don't work on Google's Chrome browser, either -- and Chrome also uses the "webkit" prefix for its experimental CSS3 properties (because it's also based on the WebKit rendering engine). Rather than detecting browser capabilities and degrading the user experience gracefully where features aren't supported -- as is the accepted best practice on modern browsers -- Apple chose to deliberately screen out any browser that doesn't self-identify as Safari. That's right: By forcing my browser's user agent string to identify as Safari 5, I was able to view many of the demos just fine in Firefox 3.6 on Windows. Seriously, Apple? I thought we left elaborate browser-detection scripts behind in the bad old days of the 1990s. I can't imagine anyone would want to start up the practice again, let alone one of the leading companies in the development of next-generation Web standards.

Is Adobe AiR a Virtual Desktop?  We expect a VD to run an alien OS and those OS specific applications.  With AiR 2.0 it seems Adobe has ditched the "OS" component of a VD, and the OS specific applications, but is quite capable of running AiR based applications and information services that would otherwise have been designed for a specific OS environment.   Another way of looking at this would be to say that VD's are designed to run existing OS and OS specific applications, while AiR is desinged to run newly written OS independent applications that have one very important advantage over legacy applications and information systems;  AiR speaks the language of the Web 3.0.   This is WebKit HTML5-CSS3 with an advanced but Air specific version of JavaScript called "ActionScript".  What Adobe doesn't do is provide support for other critically important aspects of the WebKit interactive Web 3.0 model: support for Canvas/SVG!  Adobe continues to push the proprietary SWF interactive vector graphics format.   Note that Microsoft's Silverlight universal runtime does not support anything in the WebKit Web 3.0 model!  It's all proprietary. excerpt: For the first time since 2007, Adobe has updated its Air platform, released recently in beta with a slew of new features. The features include support for detection of mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities, ability to open a file with its default application, improved cross-platform printing, and a bunch of other things that you probably won't really notice in any other way other than your Adobe working significantly more efficiently and smoothly than before. The 2.0 version of Air also will be able to support HTML5 and CSS3, due to an upgrade of its WebKit. Developers will also be happy to know that they can create Air applications that can be installed through a native installer. Air's changes have seen it morph into something of an 'operating system sitting on an operating system'. According

HTML5 app development resource and advice site.  Same people who did the excellent CSS3 Please site.

Open Source framework for building visually-immersive mobile ready magazines in HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript. excerpt:  Pugpig is an open source framework that enables you to publish HTML5 content in the form of a magazine, book or newspaper to iPhone and iPad devices. It's slick and feels like you are using a native app (we tested the it on the iPad) Pugpig is an HTML reader for iOS. It's basically a hybrid - part native application, part web app, designed to prove that you can have an HTML-based app that feels like it's native. Your app sits on top of the Pugpig framework. It can be customized and extended. For example, you can link to your own data source, change the navigation and look and feel. It can also be multi-lingual - for example, the sample app I tested leverages the AJAX API for the Microsoft Translator. Additional Pugpig benefits are its low memory footprint and ability to store a lot magazine/newspaper editions within the device, for easy offline viewing. You can offer your app in either the App Store or the new iOS 5 Newsstand (integration with the framework is in progress now).

Advanced XML, HTML5, XHTML CSS3 editing with conversion to PDF, PDF/A and SVG.  Excellent stuff.  Good Case Studies.  Lots of tools and document source code examples.

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies. Modernizr uses feature detection to test the current browser against upcoming features like rgba(), border-radius, CSS Transitions and many more. These are currently being implemented across browsers and with Modernizr you can start using them right now, with an easy way to control the fallbacks for browsers that don't yet support them. Additionally, Modernizr creates a self-titled global JavaScript object which contains properties for each feature; if a browser supports it, the property will evaluate true and if not, it will be false. Lastly, Modernizr also adds support for styling and printing HTML5 elements. This allows you to use more semantic, forward-looking elements such as , and without having to worry about them not working in Internet Explorer. Another great catch by Marbux!  He's on fire today.

[Blush.] Should be mentioned that Modernizr comes with an MIT-BSD dual license. So compatible with both GPL and proprietary apps.

The king of clicks returns!  No doubt there was a time when the mere mention of ODF and the now legendary XML "document" format wars with Microsoft could drive click counts into the statisphere.  Sorry to say though, those times are long gone. It's still a good story though.  Even if the fate of mankind and the future of the Internet no longer hinges on the outcome.  There is that question that continues defy answer; "Did Microsoft win or lose?"  So the mere announcement of supported formats in MSOffice XX is guaranteed to rev the clicks somewhat. Veteran ODF clickmeister SVN does make an interesting observation though: "The ironic thing is that, while this was as hotly debated am issue in the mid-2000s as are mobile patents and cloud implementation is today, this news was barely noticed. That's a mistake. Updegrove points out, "document interoperability and vendor neutrality matter more now than ever before as paper archives disappear and literally all of human knowledge is entrusted to electronic storage." He concluded, "Only if documents can be easily exchanged and reliably accessed on an ongoing basis will competition in the present be preserved, and the availability of knowledge down through the ages be assured. Without robust, universally adopted document formats, both of those goals will be impossible to attain." Updegrove's right of course. Don't believe me? Go into your office's archives and try to bring up documents your wrote in the 90s in WordPerfect or papers your staff created in the 80s with WordStar. If you don't want to lose your institutional memory, open document standards support is more important than ever. "....................................... Sorry but Updegrove is wrong.  Woefully wrong. The Web is the future.  Sure interoperability matters, but only as far as the Web and the future of Cloud Computing is concerned.  Sadly neither ODF or Open XML are Web ready.  The language of the Web is famously HTML, now HTML5+

Adobe has contributed the first "CSS Regions" patch to the OS WebKit project.  CSS Regions is at the core of Adobe's flowing Web Typography work, and has been submitted to the W3C CSS standardization effort.   No mention yet as to what kind of CSS3-HTML5 authoring and publication tools Adobe has in the works, but the inclusion in WebKit will no doubt shake things up in the world of visually-immersive packaging (FlipBoard, OnSwipe, TreeSaver, Needle, etc.) excerpt:Today, the first bit of Adobe-written code landed in the WebKit browser engine project, an early step to try to bring magazine-style layouts to Web pages using an extension to today's CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Adobe calls the technology CSS Regions. The move begins fulfilling a plan Adobe announced in May to build the technology into WebKit and--if the company can persuade others to embrace it--furthers Adobe's ambition to standardize the advanced CSS layout mechanism. WebKit

The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a

Todd Williams, vice president of technology and co-founder of Genuitec, which has been eyeing the Pre and its developer platform, said, "The Pre is the only phone that fully embraces the belief system that mobile Web applications are the way that enterprise mobile content will be delivered going forward. And the mobile Web is the only programming model for the Pre. WebOS is basically a WebKit-based browser that has been expanded into a complete operating system. Thus, the 'native' programming model for the Pre is HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript. There is no other model. Mojo is a JavaScript framework that provides easy integration and access with all 'on phone' content [contacts, calendar, etc.] so applications as rich as any phone's native applications can be built with modern Web technologies."

For most of this decade, web developers have been suffering the shortcomings of Internet Explorer. Like 1998 limited HTML-CSS support.  And nothing for the language of the Web - HTML+ :: HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas and advanced JavaScript.  That hasn't bothered Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) too much, because the company has historically focused on developing "real" applications that run only on Windows and don't use the browser as a platform. With the new Office web apps, many thought that Microsoft might actually have to experience the living nightmare that web app development can be. Yet the company has figured out a way to make things easier: cheat.   MIcrosof thas figured out how to provide MSOffice as Web Apps, without having to use the language of the Web: HTML+.  Instead, they use protpietary formats, protocols and interfaces to create an interesting dichotomy - a rich MS-Web, and a poor, 1998 Open-Web.