HTML5 Richness

English: W3C HTML5 Badge in SVG. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the longest time it has been that the richness on the desktop has far surpassed the richness possible in the browser. That is about to reverse with HTML5.

Ninja power: open-source HTML5 toolset aims to enable richer Web apps

Three new open-source software projects developed at Motorola Mobility .... a new content creation tool called Ninja, a JavaScript development framework called Montage, and a testing automation tool called Screening ..... The Ninja authoring tool .. 3D scenes and vector graphics ... Montage bridges the gap between developing native applications and Web sites. .. Screening completes the toolset, providing an interface for creating, editing, and manipulating application test scripts. Screening is built with Montage for the front end and NodeJS for the server, and it integrates with WebDriver implementations for Chrome, Opera, FireFox, and Internet Explorer to script the browser. .... Ninja creates all the required HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (if necessary) to render the content you create

The article talks at length and into great technical detail. It has been written by the very people who came up with the technologies being talked about.

Looks like Motorola is not strong only in hardware. It seems to have a deep bench when it comes to software as well. This work might as well have been done at Google. It is so at the edge.

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HTML5

Wikipedia: HTML5

the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) ...... core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well ..... introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications ...... Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013. ...... new video, audio and canvas elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic object tags ........ new elements, such as section, article, header and nav, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents ...... The W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which is now the target date for Recommendation. ..... advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard. ...... Ian Hickson of Google is the editor of HTML5. ...... Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as font and center, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior. ......... In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs) ...... The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing. ..... Timed media playback ..... Offline Web Applications ..... Document editing ...... Drag-and-drop .... Cross-document messaging ..... Browser history management .... MIME type and protocol handler registration ..... Microdata .... Web Storage, a key-value pair storage framework that provides behaviour similar to Cookies but with larger storage capacity and improved API. ..... Geolocation .... HTML5 alone cannot provide animation within web pages. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. ..... XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML5. .... XHTML5 requires XML's strict, well-formed syntax. ...... September 2011, 34 of the world's top 100 Web sites were using HTML5 ..... As of 1 April 2011, this logo is official. ..... The W3C then said the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications".

5G + HTML5 = Magic

Image via WikipediaWhen we get there it will be like there is just one operating system on all smartphones and tablets. Better, it will be like there is not even an operating system. The browser is all you need. And it will be a rich browser.

For the longest time the underlying assumption has been that if you want rich applications you need to do it on the desktop. On the smartphone we call them apps. By the time you hit 5G and HTML5 we will have crossed a threshold. The reverse will be true. The not rich applications will be on the desktop and in the form of apps on smartphones. The truly rich apps will be all browser based. That is really something.

This is not just an always on premise. This is an always on, and really really fast premise. And HTML5 is that architecture that all top tech companies are rapidly gravitating towards. When we get there it will be like all of software will have to be reinvented, redone. All apps will need a redo. There will be a lot of work to go around for sure.

The single biggest failure of the stimulus bill of 2009 was that taking every American into gigabit broadband territory was not the centerpiece of that legislation.

The HTML5 Whimper At F8

Image via WikipediaYesterday I meant to watch it live, but was not able to, and so I thought I would watch Zuck's speech later, but now I think I am saying a pass. The big HTML5 push I was hoping for did not happen.

Facebook New Look
HTML5 And F8

So far I am neutral about the new look. I am positive about the fact that now you will be able to see most of your wall. But I guess the whole facelift has been one for the better.

It's not only for Facebook or any one company to do HTML5. It is an industry thing. The whole industry will embrace HTML5.

HTML5 And F8

Image via CrunchBaseI hope HTML5 is the biggest thing coming out of the impending Facebook conference. Facebook Messages was not the Gmail killer it was touted to be. And maybe Facebook's HTML5 push might be yet another whimper, but I hope not.

HTML5 done right could turn Facebook into a platform, it could get an operating system like reach. It already has a huge audience.

But then it is not just Facebook, the entire industry is moving full speed towards HTML5, not just Facebook. Adobe too. And pretty much everyone else. Apple. Google.

When the internet became mainstream every company wanted a website. Today every tech company wants HTML5.

18 Months Ago GroupOn Did Not Exist

Image via Wikipedia

Reuters: Grouponomics: 18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd different markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here? There’s obviously something clever and innovative behind Groupon — but what is it? ...... “Groupon doesn’t do anything that four of us with a phone couldn’t do” ...... the more people Groupon signs up, the more targeted its deals can be ...... the idea that coupons only become activated once a certain minimum number of people have signed up for them. This is essentially a guarantee for the merchant that the needle will be moved, that their effort won’t be wasted. With traditional advertising or even with old-fashioned coupons, a merchant never has any guarantee that they will be noticed or make any difference. But with a Groupon, you know that hundreds of people will be so enticed by your offer that they’re willing to pay real money to access it. That kind of guaranteed engagement is hugely valuable, and more or less unprecedented in the world of marketing and advertising. ....... one sector, which I think is Groupon’s biggest: restaurants. ....... Before Groupon came along, there was no effective way for merchants to reach consumers in their area, while excluding everybody else. If you’re a neighborhood restaurant, you don’t want to entice people who live miles away: you want to reach locals. And while Groupon isn’t quite there yet — especially in New York, where a restaurant more than a few blocks away can feel like a schlep — it’s orders of magnitude better at targeting than anything which came before it. And it’s improving every day. ........ one of life’s great mysteries is why the New York Times is spending tens of millions of dollars building and promoting its easily-circumventable paywall, when it could have built a first-rate Groupon clone instead. The NYT has the exact home addresses — and the associated email addresses — of hundreds of thousands of well-heeled newspaper subscribers in a rich city of tiny neighborhoods. It also has a sales force which talks to local businesses regularly. It should own this space in New York City, instead of ceding it to arrivistes from Chicago who have much less specificity as to where exactly their subscribers live ........ when a few hundred people have signed up for your deal, you get a huge amount of mindshare from them. Many will redeem the Groupon very quickly, but a lot of them will wait a while, thinking about you in the back of their minds all the time ....... Groupons provide an important nudge to jolt people out of their day-to-day habits and try something new ....... By forcing people to pay for their Groupon, restaurants lock in new customers in a way that old-fashioned coupons never could. ....... a Groupon is a commitment device ...... very good at driving traffic during slow periods ...... he timed its Groupon “to create a surge of business in an otherwise soft couple of months after the holidays.” ....... 66% of merchants offering a Groupon said that the offer was profitable for them in and of itself — not including any subsequent repeat business from new customers. ....... diners spending their Groupon at a restaurant averaged a check 80% greater than the face value of the Groupon itself. ...... if that Groupon helps you to discover a new neighborhood gem where you go on to become a regular, then that’s a genuine and highly valuable service that it has performed, no matter how much money you spend on your first visit. ....... social media is at heart a fantastic way for companies to compete on quality rather than marketing glitz. ........ the best way to get great word-of-mouth is to deliver fantastic service. For a small company or even a large company which is great at what it does and never does any marketing per se, social media is a godsend. ........ Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason, attributes his company’s success not to the genius of the idea itself, but rather to Groupon’s ability to execute — to keep both consumers and merchants happy. ...... more than 95% of merchants would run their deal again or recommend Groupon to a fellow merchant. ...... enormous amounts of effort into ongoing customer service, rather than just putting four sales guys in a room with a telephone and putting them on commission. ...... Groupon itself, as much as its merchants, is counting on repeat business. And that comes from having a positive reputation which can spread like wildfire over Facebook and other social networks.

HTML 5 And The Small Screen

I am a browser bigot. I have been suspicious of the native apps on the smartphones. They have always felt ad hoc and temporary to me. They have been like mosquitoes to the swamp. You drain away the swamp and the mosquitoes are gone. You make universal wireless broadband a reality and the native apps are gone.

I Am A Browser Bigot
The Browser Will Rule The Mobile Web As Well
A Boxee Browser
Mac App Store: Bullshit
Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web
Fred Wilson On Android And HTML5

NOLOH: Not One Line Of HTML

NOLOH was conceived in the Spring of 2005 out of the frustration on the part of a talented young developer, Asher Snyder, who didn't know enough not to ask hard questions. After beating his head against a web programming challenge that would have been trivial in a desktop application Asher wondered, "How come writing Internet applications that have sophisticated user interfaces like desktop applications is so difficult?"

Hackers And Founders MeetUp: Amazing

HTML 5 And Online Video

Technology Review: The Next Stage Of Online Video Evolution: CNN and The Onion, for instance, have used it to build out their video libraries, in part because it offers new design options. "The technology is far more expressive" ..... the new Web standard lacks some features of Flash ..... Flash is much better at letting developers use digital rights management software .... a full-screen mode--the absence of which is a glaring difference between HTML5 and Flash ..... not yet fully fleshed out in HTML5 is closed captioning and subtitles via synchronized time pegs

Internet access speed is a big enough bottleneck. But the evolution to HTML 5 promises to usher in a new era for online video. Hopefully the speeds will go up too, but those are two different domains. HTML 5 is to do with programming and architecture.

But HTML 5 is not just about video, although that is where much of the noise has been. It is being said the non video aspects are actually more exciting.

And it's kinda early. HTML 5 - whatever it is - is not quite here yet.

But Adobe has Flash and Microsoft has Silverlight. It is not obvious if they are competing or parallel technologies. Smart minds have made counter claims.

Technology Review: How HTML5 Will Shake Up The Web: lesser-known features could ultimately have a much bigger impact on how users experience the Web..... ts network communications and browser storage features--could make pages load faster ...... Web Sockets provide a website with an application programming interface (API) that opens an ongoing connection between a page and a server, so that information can pass between them in real-time. ... The effect of Web Sockets is something like moving from having a conversation via e-mail to having it via instant message ..... A feature called Web Storage lets Web applications store more data inside the browser, retrieve it more intelligently .... HTML5 allows developers to embed windows of animation onto a page .... improvements in the way browsers handle forms will reduce the amount of javascript needed and speed up page loading

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Links And Likes

Image by Mars Chen via FlickrMark Zuckerberg, the Facebook dude, wants likes to replace links. And I think that is a tall order. I don't think that is possible.

But that like button is so very key to the social web. There the like button will rule. If you are only trying to figure out what you and your social graph might be interested in, then who cares about the world wide web at large? Many people in Manhattan are familiar with only two blocks, the block they live on, and the block where they work. There the like button will rule.

But what Zuck is betting on is if half a billion going on one billion people will start pressing on that like button, and then it is no longer just the social web as seen by one person. It is at that point the web itself. How is pressing a like button all that different from linking to a page. Pressing a like button perhaps is more democratic. Facebook gives most people that homepage that they always wanted but they never had because, well, it was too complicated to create one. And the like button is what the link code used to be. The link code was simple enough, basic HTML was simple enough, but says who? You can always make it simpler.

One reason Twitter is not as big as Facebook is because Twitter is too complicated.

What in the world is a hash tag? What is RT? Think about it.

But the link is not going away. There are people like me who can't be contained in two or four blocks. The link code is here to stay. One just hopes search engines (Hello Google!) get better and better at making sense of those links, they get better at staying ahead of those who try to game the search engines.

GigaOm: Links: Not Just The Currency Of The Web, But The Soul: links are a tool for synthesis, “a way of drawing connections between things,” to bring coherence to the vast universe of information online. “The Web’s links don’t make it a vast wasteland or a murky shallows,” Rosenberg says, “they organize and enrich it.” ..... The whole idea behind Tim Berners-Lee’s invention was to enable sites to point to each other and create a “web” of context. .... To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.” Hear, hear.

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Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation

The technologies behind Google Wave have been designed to bring desktop like experiences into the browser paradigm, but end up doing more than that. The shift and growth are so sure and certain soon we will be missing browser like experiences while on the desktop. Why can't I don this with a desktop client?

The browser is about to take off. The richness will only grow. The speeds will only get faster. The bandwidths will go way up. The masses of people involved will go up both on the production and the consumption sides, and there will be not be any distinct boundary between the two.

The desktop was designed for one person. The browser was always meant for the masses, for crowds. Finally the promise is catching up with capabilities.

This is barely the beginning. Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. There are many ways to use Google Wave as it exists today. There can be much innovation in how it gets applied. It is the difference between Blogger the service and all sorts of wonderful blogs you end up with. And then there are the platform and protocol aspects. Get geared for major technological leapfrogs. Here it is the difference between the iPhone and all its many applications, it is the difference between Hotmail and Gmail.

The Google Wave Architecture
17 Suggestions To Blogger
Square Search
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Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

On The Web

InfoQ: Google Wave's Architecture Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. The architecture has at its heart the Operational Transformation (OT), a theoretical framework meant to support concurrency control. ....... based on hosted XML documents (called waves) supporting concurrent modifications and low-latency updates. ...... using JavaScript and HTML5 on the client side ....... Java + Python on the server side ..... a public API and the company promises to open source the entire platform ......... modify the base code and extend it with gadgets and robots. ....... Gadgets are small programs running inside of a wave, while robots are “automated wave participants.” Wave can also be embedded in other mediums like blogs. ....... Each wave has a globally unique wave ID and consists of a set of wavelets. ...... A wavelet has an ID that is unique within its containing wave and is composed of a participant list and a set of documents. The wavelet is the entity to which Concurrency Control / Operational Transformations apply. ....... A participant may be a user, a group or a robot. ....... Documents form a tree within the wavelet. ....... the crucial part of Wave’s technology. Google Wave makes extensive use of Operational Transformations (OT) which are executed on the server. ....... Operations are sent to the server and propagated to each client on a character by character basis ......... To start communicating on a wavelet, a client sends an Open Request containing the Wave ID and the Wavelet ID to the server. The server responds with a snapshot - the serialized state of the wavelet - or a history hash of the corresponding version. ........ The Google Wave Federation Protocol allows multiple entities (wave providers) to share waves with each other.
InfoQ: Is Google Wave Going to Have an Impact on RIA/Silverlight? Wave is actually a competitor for Microsoft’s SharePoint and Exchange ....... Flash, Silverlight and Java FX ...... Some of the new features to be introduced in HTML 5 and web API proposals from W3C and WHATWG are: canvas, video, geolocation and web workers. ........ Wave which is making extensive use of HTML 5. ....... the company is “betting big on HTML 5”. ...... The Wave client is a major proof of concept (or pilot project) for HTML5. If the wave client becomes a killer app, it will have a major (negative) impact on other RIA architectures. ....... Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters ........ “Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything.” ........ today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. ....... HTML5 is a working draft still. ....... people have to use those new browsers. The slowness of standards leads me to believe that RIA platforms will be around a while ....... “[Wave] is more about competition with Exchange + IM + OneNote w/Sharepoint Integration + Outlook”. ........ The primary reason we want to open source our code is actually adoption of the protocol. ....... Wave's effect on Silverlight is indirect. HTML will enter in the RIA space with HTML 5, taking a share from Flash and Silverlight. Google's heavy support for HTML 5 will contribute to that.
Google Wave Architecture | High Scalability hosted XML documents (called waves) ..... users from different wave providers can communicate and collaborate using shared waves
Google Wave Federation Architecture ‎(Google Wave Federation ... the Google Wave Federation Protocol for federating waves between wave providers on the Internet. ........ various elements of Google Wave technology - data model, operational transformation, and client-server protocol ...... The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. ....... A robot is an automated participant on a wave (see the robots API). Examples are translation robots and chess game robots. ........ A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. ....... Different wavelets of a wave can have different lists of participants. ......... there is a designated wave provider that has the definitive copy of that wavelet. We say that this particular provider is hosting that wavelet. ......... different users have different wave views for a given wave. ...... the user's read/unread state for the wave, is stored in a user-data wavelet ....... A wave is identified by a globally unique wave id, which is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Like a wave id, a wavelet id is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Wavelets in the same wave can be hosted by different wave providers. ........ a federation gateway and a federation proxy. ........... "local wavelet" and "remote wavelet"
Salesforce rides on Google wave : News : Software - ZDNet Asia
Google Wave Architecture
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity | Web Apps News ...

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