HTML5 Development – The Edge for Developing Web Apps

With the advent of new trends of mobile technology, many changes have been affected in the browsers in recent years, although the technology in effect is based on the same tech which was in sway in the last decade of the last millennium.

An HTML5 mobile app is actually a web page or a series which work together well on the screen. These apps are device agnostic and compatible with any mobile browser. So all the content on the web is searchable which works out well for mobile devices to browse through the web especially during shopping for goods online.

Anybody who has experience developing web apps will find it easy to work with HTML5. The tech bar is lower and it is easy to start developing right on. Every mobile device nowadays has different specifications of usable screen size and resolution for every app, which means extra burden for testing on different devices. Browser incompatibility is most on Android devices so it is important to develop apps which meet the specifications of different platforms on a simultaneous basis.

One of the most important ingredients of HTML5 methodology is that most native apps will find their distribution and support easier than any other app. If you want to affect a bug fix or add an extra set of features, you can do it in a trice for all the users.

HTML5 has emerged as one of the most popular ways to build mobile applications in the last year. Multiple UI frameworks are available for different jobs and some features do a fantastic job of emulating style scrolling with momentum attached to it. JQuery Mobile is a great mobile component, with thousands of plugins which offer carousels to some very elaborate controls.

HTML5 apps are easier to develop and also boast of wide compatibility. The latest batch of internet browsers include accelerated CSS3 animation and extreme smooth motion for each of the transitions between different screens but the flexibility offered by native apps is difficult to emulate. Also multi-touch input events with different point gestures are difficult to capture with several events are difficult to reproduce.

However, significant limitations for the field of enterprise mobility include offline storage and security. Offline capabilities can be worked upon but that does not include a good solution. The database is mostly encrypted and not segmented and without keychain encryption status which is normally attached with a developer certificate. Web apps boasting of authentication which are launched with desktop PCs will require all the developers to enter relevant credentials to keep it working and to send it to third parties. Even the most trivial security measures which are embedded within the native platform are said to be an extremely complex task for a mobile Web developer. If security is of utmost importance then one needs to choose the platform to create web apps likewise. HTML5 meanwhile can give you immense compatibility with a wide range of features and compatibility with a wide range of mobile devices.

The Impact of HTML5 Development On The Web and Microsoft’s Role

HTML5 has always meant different things for all types of people. It might mean something for web development professionals related to new tags and some new attributes. For others, it spells out something new and interesting which they are not yet sure. Understanding HTML5 is actually the biggest roadblock most of us encounter.

The number of varying definitions for HTML5 is justified too since it is actually huge and has major implications in the web development arena! It is formally defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)to contain more than 100 specifications which define web technologies of the future. That means that the moniker HTML5 represents 100 things which help in developing the web for the future. The W3C has been trying to simplify the enormity of the changes with a simple moniker and a unifying concept to refer to that change.

HTML5 is actually an umbrella term which encompasses HTML, CSS and JavaScript and their latest specifications which would help developers in the near future to create the latest websites and applications. Its three parts: HTML, CSS and JavaScript are notable enough with their attributes which hint at improved markup and rich capabilities. The new JavaScript APIs are all set to make optimum use of the web.

HTML5 has introduced various notable changes to HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the 100-plus specifications describe the enhancements done in HTML5. A complete definition of HTML5 would not matter but the enhanced technologies would prove to be worthy of the developers’ time and effort.

HTML5 includes specifications set down by the W3C. The W3C has long been the institution which defined the future of technology and is in reality, a consensus-based organization which operates through committees which divide work among themselves related to specifications. All specifications go through the huge five-stage process which ranges from the first draft to the last official recommendation for the specification to be included.

Microsoft, along with other members of the group, is a member of the W3C and has been an integral part of proposing HTML5 standards and shares interest with similar groups. The company is hugely interested in the standard since developers rely on HTML5 technologies to be well implemented on major browsers for the latest standard to be a success.

Microsoft believes that it should cash it on with HTML5 and its capabilities with a four-pronged approach:

• Deliver the best HTML5 through its latest browser Internet Explorer 9
• Introduce upcoming features through IE’s Platform Previews
• Invest heavily in interoperability in multiple platforms through varied tests which are communicated to the W3C
• All other unstable standards to be prototyped through HTML5 labs

Microsoft uses HTML5 technologies in compatible sites which are often said to be "site-ready HTML" because the standard has broad support across nearly all browsers. It has tried out new technologies including new HTML tags, the Canvas tag, scalable and beautiful vector graphics, good quality audio and video, geolocation apps, cloud storage and a plethora of CSS3 modules. The features also boast of similar attributes are in IE9, and other popular browsers including Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.

Elan Emerging Technologies a leading web and mobile apps development company have team of developers that expertise in custom application development, iphone app development, android development, HTML5 app development, windows phone app development and cloud computing app development.

New Features In HTML5 Development

HTML5 is seen to be precursor to rapid web development changes and drastic enhancement in the quality of web pages. Here are some of the new features.

The HTML5 specification includes a huge array of new semantic elements which would enhance some of the parts of a web page, including the header, footer, and so on. The div tag was used to create the semantic elements but there were not specific rules or semantic meaning to it. It was difficult for software to determine what a specific element was doing. HTML5 would resolve such issues, making it easier to parse the semantic structure.

The main semantic elements that HTML5 introduces are: header, footer, nav, article, section, aside, hgroup, canvas elements. Many believe that the canvas element is one of the breakthrough elements of HTML5 since it introduces graphs, interactive games, and other graphics without having to use external plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. The element describes the width, height, and unique ID for every object. A series of JavaScript APIs can be used to draw objects after a typical web page renders it. One can draw shapes and lines; apply color and set its gradient and even perform animation. The APIs make the web pages interactive and responsive helping adequately in game development and other Web applications.

The Web was not built previously with audio or video content in mind and the provision of this was largely provided by Flash Video (.flv) file format.

HTML5 introduces audio and video thus allowing HTML5 developers to include multimedia content without the need for browser plug-ins. Most browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome, provide browser playback controls too. Standard JavaScript APIs allow developers to create their own playback controls. In this way, the rendering of the web page requires less CPU resources leading to energy savings.

There are many decisions related to HTML5 which are pending and its accessibility is required in a variety of formats and browsers. Web developers have traditionally used cookies for storing information about a Web page in the local machine. The only hitch is not more than 20 cookies per Web server can be saved. HTML5 though provides a solution with the help of local storage APIs which allows developers for information storage. The specification also includes same-origin restrictions.

HTML5 provides support for all types of offline applications where the browser downloads the files and the user can uses the application offline.

There are some form controls which include plenty of function for form fields like name, phone number, and address. HTML forms are used for submission of contact forms and hence web developers need sophisticated form controls like date/time pickers, color pickers and the like. Developers need to use an external JavaScript library or a framework such as Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight for running the controls. HTML5 on the other hand, provides a whole range of new form input types including color, date, email, month, number, range, url and the like.

Support for such form fields is quite limited today. Safari and Opera browser provide some features to run these controls including some new widgets.

HTML5 also supports two new features for form fields: autofocus and the placeholder attribute. The autofocus tells the browser which field to focus on without external role while the placeholder attribute allows the developer to define text that will appear in an empty text control.

Geo-location, Drag and Drop, Cross-document messaging are some of the new features introduced in HTML5 development.