In the beginning of July, I was attending and giving a presentation at the London Ajax Mobile Event about possibilities offered by HTML5 and CSS3 when it comes to developing mobile web sites and applications.

Short introduction of me

Being my first post here at Mozilla Hacks, I thought I’d start by briefly introducing myself first: My name is Robert Nyman and I’ve recently joined Mozilla as a Technical Evangelist, talking about HTML5, the Open Web and how we can help web developers. I’ve been working since 1999 with Front End development for the web, and I regularly blog at http://robertnyman.com, tweet as @robertnyman and love to travel and meet people!

The London Ajax Mobile Event

The conference took place at the Vodafone headquarters in London, arranged by Sitepen CEO and Dojo co-founder Dylan Schiemann. It was packed to the brim with speakers, from early morning raging on into the night. Various talks were given on a number of topics – from mobile apps and implementations to a more experimenting approach and future visions.

My presentation

You can see the slides from my HTML5 and CSS3: Exploring Mobile Possibilities below or download the slides at SlideShare

The aim of my talk was to give both an introduction and reiterate on some of the important options we have when developing web sites, especially when it comes to the mobile world. With the CSS3 field I covered CSS Media Queries and Flex Box and the options they give us in creating more flexible layouts and presentation alternatives. I also spoke about CSS Transitions and Animations and how they can assist in an easy manner to get nice effects, that are also hardware-accelerated on certain devices.

When it comes to the HTML5 part, I’m excited by all the new HTML5 form elements and how they can improve both user experience and the input of data. As support grows for this in web browsers, I believe it will make things a lot easier for both developers and end users.

I briefly touched on link protocols, such as tel: and sms:, to trigger mobile-specific actions when activating a link, and then various useful APIs such as Web Storage, Offline Applications, History API and Geolocation (not all necessary official HTML5 APIs, but usually used in conjunction with them).

I ended the talk with touching on tool such as Steve Souders’ Mobile Perf bookmarklet and weinre, for remote debugging on mobile devices.

You and mobile

What I am interested in is if you are developing for a multitude of mobile and other devices, what you believe are the biggest obstacles as well as the most promising options. Any thoughts, please let me know!