GIDS Session 3 - HTML 5

Scott Davis : I really loved his sessions last year. He is a real expert on Grails. He has a website on thirstyhead.com.

Starts of with a quip on his new shirt.



HTML 5 enhancements

1) Form enhancements, mobile support

Biggest new feature. --> Semantics over markup. Currently pages are cluttered with Divs currently. You can provide separate tags for various page sections like nav, header , footer and sections.

Screen readers can parse the code and act accordingly.

Desktop Browser support for HTML 5
Google already uses HTML 5 and provides outstanding support in their chrome browser.
Apple Safari already supports HTML 5
Mozilla Firefox and Opera supports HTML 5 as well.

IE 9 supports HTML 5 specification even though its not available on windows xp.

Good that everyone is now meeting the specifications.

Support for Mobile in HTML 5

All applications are HTML 5 with a thin app wrapper like NYTImes. Javascript is the write once run anyware platform finally :).

RIM Playbook has outstanding HTML 5 support.

Cost to implement technology is very high initially, and the value is very low. Dont wait for final standard. You need to wait for Oreilly book on that technology then its here to be used :)


HTML 5 is here to stay and start now instead of waiting .

http://diveintohtml5.org by Mark Pilgrim . Entirely free online book.


New Elements

Doctype is amazingly simple :

New semantic elements: header, nav, footer,section, article, aside.

HTML 5 Reset Stylesheet : Include all these to use display:block;

http://html5shiv.google.com/svn/trunk/html5.js




Form Enhancements

INput elements support following new values : tel,search, url, email, dateime, date, month, week, time, email .


Any browser that doesnt support the new values, will present a text instead. this is true only for desktop browsers. But mobile browses have issues.

Modernizr
Checks for html features support. New idea is to program to the most mordern browser and pollyfill for the others using Modernizr.

Mobile support : Smart phones and Tablets are selling really fast.

www.html5rocks.com

App Cache : explicitly cache js, css, images.

Cache Manifest can explicity cache resources.

Cache,Network and fallback sections.

typical application could be an twitter client in html5 that can switch between online and offline mode. Full control of the cache through javascript.

Data Storage : Allows you to storage as a hashmap.Upto 5 MB of local storage is available per domain per url.

Web SQL database : supported by all browsers except firefox and IE.


Video support


Youtube html5 video player. Use video with object tags combination.

Some more websites to checkout :
http://html5doctor.com
http://html5demos.com/

ON the whole it was an awesome session , that really opened up the world of HTML 5.

HTML 5 Cross browser Polyfills is the way to go