Future of Web Apps London: HTML5
I was privileged to be invited to speak on HTML5 at Future of Web Apps London last week. My talk was called HTML5: The Future of Web Applications (PDF 636K). It's a newly written talk that concentrates on the apps side of the language, rather than the markup side that I usually show. That seemed appropriate given the apps-focus of the show, and the HTML5 editor's assertion that HTML5 is
extending the language to better support Web applications, since that is one of the directions the Web is going in and is one of the areas least well served by HTML so far. This puts HTML in direct competition with other technologies intended for applications deployed over the Web, in particular Flash and Silverlight.
The video is now available, as is a transcript.
The resources that I demoed were
- Eye-candy
canvas
canvas
first-person shootercanvas
first-person gifter- the excanvas library to port
canvas
to Internet Explorer - Filament Group's jQuerty plugin using
canvas
for graphing data tables - Raphaël JavaScript Library to make SVG that also works in Internet Explorer
- SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on Internet Explorer (alpha code: not ready for production)
- My HTML5 forms demo, including range, date, placeholder, regex validation (try in Opera and Chrome)
- modernizr - a small HTML5 capability detection library
- HTML5demos.com - Remy Sharp's demos of geolocation, offline storage and web database and many others
- Video demos
You might also want to check out
- SVG vs. Canvas on Trivial Drawing Application: a comparison of
canvas
and SVG - HTML5 Authors spec
- A video of Dean Edwards demoing his unreleased JavaScript library that detects and plugs the holes in current browsers' HTML5 support
Opera Developer Network has some beginner's canvas
tutorials available:
- HTML 5 canvas - the basics
- Creating an HTML 5 canvas painting application
- Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting
- Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting: Part 2
Early the next morning, I was woken by the organisers asking me to do a second talk. As I had no time to prepare, I coded an HTML5 page live. Five minutes before going on stage, my laptop died; thanks so much to the guys on the Microsoft stand who lent me a replacement Windows machine, installed the necessary software and got my lappie running again!
Consequently there are no slides to publish, but I have an article called Designing a blog with HTML that covers the same ground. (Two articles on this blog cover it in much more detail: Redesigning with HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA and Marking up a blog with HTML 5 (part 2).)
Some other useful resources:
- HTML5 validator
- HTML5 outliner
- HTML5 Doctor (I'm a co-curator of this site)
You can also download Opera 10 which I was using to demo.
There is a snippet of an interview with me about HTML5 and mobile by Natali del Conte.
Finally, thanks to all those who came along and gave me great feedback. I was literally hoarse from chatting in the breaks, in the pub and everywhere else about HTML5. The biggest gripe (apart from those appalled by the fact that you can use XML syntax or not, as you wish) was the stylability of the new form elements and their error messages. I'd love to hear your feedback on this.