Mozilla Hacks

Luke Crouch on: HTML5 – code for all the platforms

Avatar photo By Chris Heilmann

Posted on November 27, 2011 in HTML

Back in October, Luke Crouch, one of the web developers working on the Mozilla Developer Network went to Techfest in Tulsa, Oklahoma to tell people all about HTML5. You can see his slides with his voiceover at Usergroup.tv:

Luke Crouch: Code for all the platforms

Luke gave an overview on the history of HTML5 vs. XHTML and the approaches of the W3C and the WHATWG. He explains how standards are produced and how this can be daunting. He then shows how “shipping code wins” and showcases lots of examples of new technology in action.

He concludes with a nice comparison on how much simpler it is to build rich form interfaces with HTML5 and polyfills than with native code for various platforms.

All in all a presentation very worth while from someone who is in the trenches and who is not afraid to use new technology and wait for the market to catch up.

About Chris Heilmann

Evangelist for HTML5 and open web. Let's fix this!

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3 comments

  1. Stephan Sokolow

    I won’t have time to watch it for a few days yet, but I can predict I’ll generally agree.

    HTML5+CSS3+CoffeeScript+jQuery makes for very easy UI-building, nothing beats it for whipping up custom widgets, and, MS-IE aside, it’s flat-out fun.

    …of course, there ARE still some things I doubt it’ll ever be able to do satisfactorily.

    Primarily things that either need highly-optimized disk I/O without having to keep the UI and privilieged code separated by a network socket (like a bulk image manager and high-speed tagger I’m working on, albeit slowly) or fast, memory-light utilities which, by nature, need to do privilieged things like generating shaped, borderless windows smaller than a banner ad or augmenting the desktop with new behaviours. (The sort of thing I’d write with PyGTK or Vala and some profiling tools.)

    …and command-line scripts in general, of course.

    It’s always important to have a good understanding of the limits of each and every one of your favorite tools.

    November 27th, 2011 at 11:51

  2. Daniel Glazman

    I stopped watching the slides when I read CSS 2D and 3D Transforms attached to WHATWG.

    “Because shipping code wins”. Ah. Shipping code led to the a massive CSS Gradients mess, with 4 incompatible versions of gradients massively used in the wild. It currently leads to major problems in 2D and 3D Transforms and Animations, shipped and massively used before any stabilization.

    November 27th, 2011 at 20:24

  3. groovecoder

    Hmm … as far as I could tell putting the presentation together, CSS animations were introduced by WHATWG members and finished together with W3C in 2008 when the groups started working together again. But I’m open to corrections – I wasn’t actively involved in either group at the time.

    If you stopped there, you missed the counter-balancing quote to “shipping code wins” …

    “Implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. You don’t want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification. However, you also don’t want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback. There is unavoidable tension here, but we just have to muddle on through … I think we’re doing OK.” (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/0107.html)

    I’m not a big CSS developer, but it sounds like CSS gradients and transforms have muddled thru that tension. The talk is/was directed at enterprise (mostly Microsoft) developers. The point of “shipping code wins” was to tell them not to wait on a vendor for Silverlight or Flash or any platform technology – go ship HTML5 code now.

    November 28th, 2011 at 07:45

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