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An Inside Look at HTML5 - Molly Holzschlag at FOWA

Posted on Mar 01, 2010

Molly Holzschlag from Opera (@mollydotcom), the next speaker at FOWA Miami 2010, spoke about HTML5. We don't expect to see an actual spec until 2022 but there are things you can do today of course. One important note, she says HTML5 is trying to be inclusive of all the things we have done on the web (such as, yes, the blink tag). HTML5 came out of the WHAT-WG which is the web hypertext applications technology working group. The WHAT-WG and W3C are working side-by-side but not always in agreement. The current spec is 900 pages!

Canvas is the drawing API for the web that you use JavaScript to create the drawings. It is powerful stuff but there are some issues and controversies around it including accessibility issues. Within the W3C canvas is at risk of being tossed out of HTML5 and into its own working group. There are also controversies about ownership including its possibility as a "flash killer." All of these things are changing very fast.

One of the goals was to take a look at HTML forms and to take out the heavy reliance of JavaScript to do things forms should be able to do. For instance, you could add an "autofocus" attribute to your input and this input would gain initial focus when the page is loaded. Another example is form validation, where you could add a "required" keyword that would make a form input required. Once again, this would eliminate chunks of JavaScript that are currently required to add this client-side functionality.

Another item she discussed is storage such as offline web applications (a la Google Gears) and ApplciationCache. She says that sometimes discussion of HTML5 is becoming an umbrella for many things that HTML should probably not handle. However she lists a number of interesting items that are coming such as access to geolocation data, native JSON and more.

Lastly, HTML5 will include device API's for the mobile web. JIL (Joint Innovation Lab) is working on widget and device development. BONDI are also working on the same topic - sometimes side-by-side and sometimes together with JIL. They want to allow easy access to things like remaining battery power, bandwidth, processor speed and other mobile specific behavior.

Comments

Thanks so much for this nice coverage. Just to put a fine point on the HTML5 "umbrella" issue, the JIL and BONDI specs are not HTML5 but APIs related to devices.

It was a great FOWA!

Posted By Molly E Holzschlag / Posted on 03/02/2010 at 3:46 AM