michael(tm) smith wnd09 presentation
TRANSCRIPT
Web standards & the browser landscapeThe year in review, the year ahead
http://slideshare.net/sideshowbarker
http://slideshare.net/sideshowbarker/mikesmith-wnd09-presentation
For overview of first 6 months of 2008:http://slideshare.net/sideshowbarker/xtech-may-2008
The single most significant Web-technologies milestone of the first half of 2008 was the first beta release of IE8, in March 2008.
Other major Web-technologies milestones of first half of 2008...
CSS3 Selectors support now complete in most major browsers.
CSS Selectors API now implemented across all major browser engines? (including IE8)
ARIA support now implemented across all major browser engines (including IE8).
HTML5 offline applications and client-side data storage features now implemented in multiple browsers (for good overview, see Brad Neuberg slides for WDN09).
Milestones after May 2008, and what to pay attention to in 2009…
SVG
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) enables you to create images & animations that:
• automatically scale up & down to any size
• as with HTML5 <canvas>, are fully dynamic and JavaScript scriptable
December 2008: SVG Tiny 1.2 published as full W3C Recommendation (which means it is a final Standard)
December 2008: Brad Neuberg (Google) announces he is working on using IE Behaviors to enable SVG support in any Flash-enabled browser — so you can have SVG support in IE 6 (or IE 8, or whatever).
• not just static SVG, but also dynamic, JavaScript scriptable SVG
• aiming for public release by late summer/autumn 2009
16 Jan 2009: SMIL patch lands in Mozilla
• Brian Birtles and Daniel Holbert
• provides necessary base to enable Moz/Firefox to be brought on-par with SVG animations support in Opera and WebKit
• Mozilla already has better SVG filters support than WebKit, so after Moz gets SVG animations, their SVG support will gaining on Opera’s
http://codedread.com/svg-support.php
Autumn 2009: SVG Open event will take place in San Francisco Bay Area.
W3C Geolocation API
The W3C Geolocation API enables you to create location-aware Web applications that provide things like:
• turn-by-turn route navigation (just like GPS navigation systems in cars)
• location-tagged status updates in social networking applications
• much more…
December 2008: W3C Working Draft of Geolocation API published.
http://w3.org/TR/geolocation-API/
Support for Geolocation API in browsers:
• February 2009: Lars Erik Bolstad announces Geo API support in Opera
• October 2008: Greg Bolsinga lands Geo API support in WebKit
• August 2008: Doug Turner lands Geo API support in Mozilla
• August 2008: Andrei Popescu (from Google, editor of W3C Geolocation API spec) lands Geo API support in Gears
JavaScriptengines
• Feb 2009: Opera announces new JS engine, Carakan
• Sep 2008: Google Chrome released, with V8 JS engine
• Sep 2008: WebKit project lands SquirrelFish Extreme
• Aug 2008: Mozilla TraceMonkey lands
Q: Why do we really need JavaScript engines that are so blazingly fast? (JS speed in current browsers seems quite fast to me.)
A: Mobile.
A high-end smartphone is likely to have, say, a 400MHz ARM CPU.
WiFi-enabled gaming device like the Nintendo DSi is likely to have a 133MHz ARM CPU.
While you may find speed of JS engines to be quite fast in desktop browsers, you won’t find it quite so satisfyingly fast in browsers running on those kinds of devices…
Chromium(Google Chrome)
September 2008: Google Chrome first beta release.
Things to consider:
• Google poached^w recruited some of the brightest browser engineers in the world to work on Chrome/Chromium.
• Dev team has solid commitment to standards.
• Browser competition is a good thing.
• Chrome/Chromium work will bring new innovations, help to drive new standards.
How to keep up with browser news
One-stop shopping:
http://ajaxian.com/Who to thank: Dion Almaer,Ben Galbraith, Chris Heilmann et al
See also:Simon Willisonhttp://simonwillison.net/http://friendfeed.com/simonw
Developer tools in browsers
• Firebug, etc., in Mozilla: talk with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer
• Dragonfly in Opera: talk with David Storey, Lars Erik Bolstad, and Chris Mills
• Developer Tools feature in IE8: talk with Joshua Allen, Will Mason, Chris Wilson, Pete LePage
• Web Inspector in WebKit (also in Chrome): nobody from WebKit here at WDN to talk with :(
SunOMS Video
December 2008: Rob Glidden announces publication of OMS Video draft spec.
http://www.robglidden.com/2008/12/oms-video-draft/
What is it? A new specification for a royalty-free video codec, essentially competing with MPEG4 AVC (H.264).
Sun is spending large amounts of money to do a very systematic review of patents and prior art (to ensure that it does not infringe on any existing intellectual property.)
Significance: OMS Video could help tremendously to change the state of video on the Web in a very positive way (and also IPTV — which is likely the real reason Sun is spending so much money to develop it).
W3C Validator
August 2008: Olivier Théreaux announces HTML5 support in W3C Validator (using Henri Sivonen’s validator.nu backend code).
If you use the W3C Validator, consider donating/sponsoring to help support it.
http://w3.org/QA/Tools/Donate
Come to Web Directions North 2010!
Thanks for your attention.Questions? Comments?