Preface:
The HTML5 Standard has gained immense popularity and is being widely adopted by the web and mobile development community and web browsers including mobile device browsers. .Realizing the importance of HTML5, Apexon has been training its development teams on various HTML5 tools and technologies, with a focus on – Mobile development and Mobile QA and automation services. Earlier this year, Apexon’s special Core Services Engineering Team (CSET) was tasked with R&D on HTML5 and other mobile web development technologies. Being a part of this team, I got the opportunity to attend Microsoft’s HTML5 Web Camp last week in Malvern, Pennsylvania. It was a very informative camp, and I personally discovered many new tools and technologies related toHTML5 and related sub standards. Through this blog, I would like to share my experience and learning from this camp. I hope you find it useful.
Welcome!!
After about 4 hours of early morning journey – scarifying my deep sleep to answer some personal and official emails while travelling, I reached to Microsoft Malvern, Pennsylvania just 10 minutes before the start time. As expected, there was a huge crowd that had gathered to learn more about HTML5 and hear from industry veterans. We got a very warm welcome at the reception. .In case you got bored or tired, there was an XBOX in the reception area for you. Fortunately, at no point during the conference I got bored and my passion to learn more about HTML5 overshadowed the tiredness from travel and lack of sleep.
Speakers:
The whole event was handled by two well known – Microsoft evangelists, who need a detailed introduction. But I will briefly talk about their presentations.
2. G. Andrew Duthie: He is gadget guy – presented items with gadgets and described many useful tools and facts about HTML5 during his session. He presented the session with two systems one for presentation and one for demo having big icons on the desktop!!
First Session with Rachel Appel
With a cup of coffee, I started attending the first session on HTML5 standard by Rachel and she explained the HTML5 standard, how it passes from different phases, what’s new, CSS3 and EcmaScript5 etc. with a well prepared presentation and specific examples with source code.
Rachel made it a very interesting session by adding fun and facts in her presentation.
The main points come across during this session:
1. HTML5 standard is not completed yet.
My Note: The HTML5 working group’s charter end date is December 2014. However, I think it would be completed earlier as it is gaining popularity and there is great demand. HTML5 working group charter is available here.
2. The HTML5 standard has more than 900 pages for specs. Other related standards have their own space. Wish to get a feel of the enormity of HTM5 standard specs? Click here – notice how tiny the sidebar becomes after the page is completely loaded J
3. There are 925+ test cases for this standard. Microsoft has an IE Testcenter site which shows that how many test cases of HTML5 and other standards have passed on different browsers for the specified specifications. This will help the system architectsand designers in understanding the supported browsers and planning for patches or libraries to support it.
My Note: You can check how different browsers score on html5 support using HTML5Test site. Interestingly, my android phone’s browser score 177/450 was higher than my IE9 browser score 141/450. However, the score will be very high for IE10 as we saw during the event. FYI, the IE is implementing only the fully recommended specs right now.
4. The HTML5 is also integrated with other specs like CSS3, SVG, ECMA5 etc.
5. The HTML5 working group is chaired by experts from IBM, Microsoft and Apple. Apart from this, 40 member organizations, 411 participants and 280 invited experts are working on HTML5 standard specs.
6. There are eight publications related to this huge exercise.
7. Currently, it is in working draft phase, after which, it will pass through candidate recommendations, proposed recommendations and recommendations phase. There should be at least two successful implementations of any two products to pass the recommendation phase. It means, the standard should be completely implemented by two browsers with all the specs for it to becomea real standard.
8. Microsoft had prepared site for HTML5 standards, which are unstable but prototyped by Microsoft.
10. Some of the new Semantic Tags that have been introduced: section, nav, article, aside, hgroup, header, footer, figure, figcaption, mark
11. No plugins will be required for audio and video. Just use the audio and video tag. <video> supports poster as well. This will work fine with Silverlight and Flash.
My Note: What do you think about the advertising attribute based on your experience with current video streaming?
Ecmascript 5
More on security and library update!!. You can check the browser compatibility table for different objects and properties of EcmaScript5 here.
Css3
2. Box Model
4. Text effects
6. Animations
7. User interface
The Microsoft CSS3 guide will be available here.
GPU
Microsoft is building new Windows technologies like Direct2D, DirectWrite and XPS to enable Internet Explorer 9 to render all standards-based web content — text, images, video and SVG — using the power of the GPU. Read this for more information on GPU powered HTML5.
Now to see the benefits on your IE9,
First try to open Fish IE Tank benchmark application from Microsoft Test Drive. Toggle the GPU rendering by unchecking the option “Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering” via Tools->Internet Options->Advanced Tab and run the Fish IE Tank again. You will observe the very big difference. So which mode will you use now?
Ah.. Thus, the first session completed with interesting Q & A session.
Conclusion on Session-1:
I wanted to write about all the sessions in one single blog, but it is impossible to fit all the information shared during this camps .
If this blog has intrigued your interest in HTML5, and you have any questions on HTML5 and smartphones, then wait until Monday Sept. 5, 2011 @ 6.30 PM for session HTML5 – A New Buzz in Smartphone Industry in Ahmedabad, India – not by the technocrat like me, but by one of the very well-known smartphone application architects.
NOTE: All the views and points in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views of InfoStrech.
