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IE9 Leads Pack in HTML5 Support? Not Exactly

Facebook-Web-Design — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:52:50 +0000

Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

The standards body that oversees HTML5 has released the results of its first tests designed to measure the level of HTML5 support in web browsers. The results, surprisingly, put Internet Explorer 9 ahead of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Microsoft’s IE9 team deserves some major credit for finally building a browser with strong support for web standards. However, despite the impressive showing in the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) tests, it would be pure fiction to suggest that IE9 is that far ahead of its competitors when it comes to supporting HTML5, CSS 3 and other components of the new web.

The reason IE9 tops the W3C’s list is that the test looks at only a fraction of the HTML5 spec. In other words, the test is very limited. Even better, it’s limited to things IE9 is good at.

The W3C test looks at seven elements of HTML5: attributes, audio, video, Canvas, getElementsByClassName, foreigncontent, and XHTML5. While the audio, video and Canvas tags are perhaps the most widely used components in HTML5, that list is a long way from covering the entire HTML5 specification.

Run IE9 against other aspects of HTML5 and the browser would be decidedly behind its competitors. IE9 lacks support for Web Workers, drag-and-drop features, SVG animations and the File API, all of which are vital components for building useful web applications, and all of which enjoy considerable support in other browsers.

IE 9 has some support for CSS 3, but it lags behind other browsers, and it can’t handle much of SVG 1.1. From a web developer’s viewpoint, that means IE9 will load your Canvas tags, but if you’re using transforms or other animations based on CSS 3 tools, IE 9 users won’t see what you can show to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari users.

As an aside, running IE9 through the decidedly less formal (but still informative) HTML5Test site, the browser doesn’t perform as well as the competition. It scores 90 out of 300 points. Google Chrome scores 231 points and Safari 5 scores 208 points. Firefox 4 Beta slots in at 204 points. The HTML5Test site ranks browsers based not only on W3C-approved components of HTML5, but also some experimental stuff, and some components that aren’t in the spec at all but are widely considered important tools for building more powerful HTML5 web applications, like Geolocation.

Perhaps what’s most curious about the areas IE9 does look good — the HTML5 Canvas, audio and video tags — is that they’re are all areas where Microsoft has previously touted its Silverlight platform as the ideal solution. With IE9, Microsoft is clearly backing away — at least for now — from its proprietary platform and moving toward the open web for these applications.

Internet Explorer 9 may not be perfect when it comes to HTML5 — no browser is — but at least it’s making huge strides over its predecessors. Perhaps the development would be more encouraging if its predecessors weren’t so firmly entrenched in the dark ages of the early web.

The latest version of Microsoft’s browser is expected to arrive in its final form some time during 2011. It is currently in beta release, and if you’re running Windows 7 or Vista, you can download it now.

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New Standard Hopes to Unify Your Address Book

Facebook-Web-Design — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:32:27 +0000

If you’re like most of us, you probably have contact and address book data spread all over the web — friends on Facebook, contacts in Gmail, followers on Twitter, and names in your local address book application.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all that data were available in one place where you could see it all, control which sites have access to it and manage your on and offline friends?

The truly unified address book is still a ways off, but there is hope it will be especially useful once it arrives thanks to some emerging standards.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body that creates and oversees web standards, has published a working draft of what’s known as the Contacts API. The goal behind the Contacts API is to provide a way to unify your address book, pulling from both local and online sources, and to allow you to better control how third-party websites access your data.

The latest draft incorporates feedback based on the earlier draft, first published back in January of 2010. It builds upon the work being done on vCard and Portable Contacts, among other contact systems already being used on the web. The final version is penciled in for mid-2011.

The Contacts API is part of a broader initiative at the W3C called the Ubiquitous Web Applications activity. The purpose of the group is to develop underlying infrastructures web services can take advantage of to make web apps more powerful and more useful. The Geolocation API, which lets a web app learn your location, and the Devices API, which lets a web app access a camera or microphone in your hardware, are also part of the same initiative. It also fits into the ideals outlined by the W3C’s vision of a semantic web.

So what will the Contacts API standardize? Currently, if a site wants to access your contacts list it generally does so by grabbing, say, your whole Gmail contacts list. Even with standards like OAuth, which gives you control over which sites can access your contacts list, you still don’t have much in the way of fine-grained permissions.

Say you want Facebook to only grab contacts that you’ve put in the address group “friends” in your Gmail address book. With the current controls, you’re out of luck. But if and when the Contacts API is ratified and adopted, that’s exactly the sort of thing it would allow you to do.

The Contacts API would also give the browser a method of unifying all your various contacts lists — for example your contacts from Gmail, Facebook and your local address book all merged to single list.

It sounds grand, no doubt, but the Contacts API is a long way from reality. Mozilla has experimented with the API (along with other tools) to create the Labs project Contacts, but like the APIs it uses, Contacts is still very much a work in progress.

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W3C’s Unicorn Validator Checks Multiple Standards at Once

Facebook-Web-Design — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:30:50 +0000

Want to find out how magically terrible your web code is? Just ask the Unicorn.

The web’s governing body has launched a new validation tool called Unicorn that checks the quality of your website’s code against multiple web standards at the same time.

You can find the new Unicorn “all-in-one validator” on the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) website at validator.w3.org/unicorn/.

The W3C maintains a number of free web-based tools for checking whether your web code is valid, and Unicorn makes several of these tools available under a single interface. Just plug in a URL and you can see your results for all of these tests on a single page:

HTML/XHTML markup validator
CSS validator
Atom or RSS feed validator
mobileOK, which tells you how friendly your site is to mobile visitors

When you visit the Unicorn page, you’ll see a dropdown menu where you can choose what to check. The default is a “General Conformance Check,” which runs all the validators at once and is particularly unforgiving. Your site may validate as strict XHTML, but your syndication feeds and mobile accessibility might be a mess. It’s almost impossible to rack up a perfect score, so be prepared for a lot of red ink.

You can also select one of the individual validation services in the dropdown. Each of the individual validators also continues to run on its own service, and the W3C confirms they aren’t going anywhere.

Unicorn will continue to roll in more validation options over time. There’s already a wiki where you can learn how to write additional modules.

The wiki is also where you’ll find links to the Unicorn code. You can run your own instance of the validator to test your own pages, or you can set up a public Unicorn server for others to use.

Every time we post about one of these validation tools, we get a small flood of comments pointing out that our own web pages don’t validate properly. We know, and we’re working on it. So, just to save you the trouble, here’s Webmonkey and Wired. You’ll notice that our RSS feeds are perfect — Unicorn’s only quibble is that we put Flash-video-object embeds in our syndicated posts. Big whoop.

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Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264

Facebook-Web-Design — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:41:07 +0000

Microsoft’s next browser will support native playback of videos using HTML5, but it will only support H.264, and not its more open alternatives.

In a post on the official IEBlog Thursday, Microsoft’s general manager of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch outlined his company’s position in the ongoing Flash vs. HTML5 video debate. He says that when it comes to playing web videos without plug-ins, Microsoft will support H.264-encoded videos in its browser. He makes no mention of those encoded with Theora or any other codecs, and nobody is expecting Microsoft to support anything other than H.264 — Hachamovitch first mentioned singular support for H.264 in IE9 last month when he showed off an early version of the browser.

The argument over which web video playback technology to support has been a point of major tension among browser makers ever since last year, when the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) bowed out of the debate, declining to recommend any single video technology for HTML5. The result, so far, is a stalemate — Microsoft and Apple are supporting H.264, Mozilla and Opera are supporting Ogg Theora and Google, for the time being, is supporting both.

As we’ve said before, H.264 is a dangerous path for web video to go down, mostly because there are patents and licensing issues associated with it that keep it from being freely used. It should be noted that both Microsoft and Apple — the two main proponents of native H.264 playback in their browsers — hold patents in the H.264 patent pool.

Other technologies, such as Ogg Theora and VP8, appear to be a much safer alternative for video on the web to remain free and open, which is why the browser makers who have no stake in H.264 (Mozilla and Opera) are pushing for Theora.

Google Chrome’s support varies based on platform, and there’s a rumor the company will release the VP8 video technology it now owns under an open source license soon.

Curiously, there’s no mention of Silverlight in Hachamovitch’s post. But he doesn’t tie Flash to the whipping post like so many others have been quick to do. His words on Flash are quite tempered. Diplomatic, even:

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

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A Brave New Web Will Be Here Soon, But Browsers Must Improve

Facebook-Web-Design — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:05:17 +0000

The great promise of HTML5 is that it will turn the web into a full-fledged computing platform awash with video, animation and real-time interactions, yet free of the hacks and plug-ins common today.

While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”