Webmonkey is reporting a new site dedicated to helping HTML5 web developers know which HTML and CSS features have broad enough adoption to use now.
Although as an HTML5 developer I’m definitely very pro-HTML5, I disagree with this article which suggest that HTML5 will eventually replace native apps. I think HTML5 will power more apps in the future than it does now, I don’t think it’ll ever replace native apps.
Here’s an article worth reading which discusses the various options from native to web apps. It’s important to note that while HTML5 is gaining traction for mobile apps, HTML5 developers are often using a native wrapper to deploy their apps and get some of the performance and device-native functionality that they want.
A Google Chrome engineer has released Filer.js, a library for working with the HTML5 Filesystem API.
From the article:
The idea, says Bidelman, is to make the HTML5 API “more approachable for developers that have done file I/O in other languages” as well as making common operations like renaming, moving and duplicating files easier.
This is a great read on HTML5 happenings in 2011. As HTML5 is a somewhat vague term, I particularly liked this paragraph:
HTML5 is a semantic markup language. It actually does very little. It indicates where one paragraph ends and another begins. If all we had that was new was strict HTML5 markup, then we would have virtually nothing. After all, HTML5 doesn’t even control what a web page looks like. That honor falls to CSS. HLML5 most certainly doesn’t provide a way to program behavior - that honour falls to JavaScript. What seems to have happened is that HTML5 has become a catch-all name that means “all that new stuff”. Perhaps an even better interpretation is “all that new stuff and the extra bits that I particularly like”.
Adobe is embracing HTML5 as it kills mobile Flash. HTML5 web developers should recognize this as a sign that Adobe is conceding the future to HTML5.
Take a look at the HTML5 “surface” demo in this video.
A short but worthwhile read on how WAI-ARIA can work with HTML5 to make pages clean and accessible. Most HTML5 developers probably aren’t putting accessibility at the forefront but with simple techniques like the example in this article, it isn’t hard to start.
