September 2011 - Posts
HTML5FEST Conference
The Israeli W3C office holds an annual conference of Israeli web community, with the participation of leading web developers and representatives of global W3C. This year the conference is called HTML5Fest and it will take place in October 25 at Kfar Ha’Maccabiah. The conference will include three tracks: Mobile Web, Browser & Desktop Apps, and Public and Government Internet.
I was asked to speak in the conference and agreed, so you can come and hear me talk about “Building Cutting-Edge Sites - HTML5 and Government Organizations”. In the session I’m going to talk about the changes that HTML5 brings and how it is related to government organizations challenges. If you ask yourself how is this topic connected to me then I can tell that I was part of Israel Government Portal development team in the past. Also, I helped to create some of Israel Ministry of Finance sites as a developer and as a team leader.
For further information about the conference you can go to the conference web site.
Hope to see you there!
HTML5 Adoption Strategies
One of the questions that I got in the session that I delivered today was how to adopt HTML5 today? Since this was a very good question I decided to share what I think about it.
Why Do We Need Adoption Strategies?
You might ask yourself why do you need an adoption strategy for HTML5? The answer is simple. HTML5 includes many specifications that evolve in different rates. Therefore, the specification support in browsers is complicated to implement for the browser vendors. There are stable specifications such as Geolocation which are implemented by all the major browsers and there are less stable specifications like Web Sockets that aren’t. So, if you want to use an HTML5 specification in your web application how can you do that without breaking your application in some of the browsers? The answer to this question is to ask yourself whether you really need the feature. If you really need it then you can use adoption strategies in order to implement the feature.
Adoption Strategies
Here is a list of strategies that you can apply in order to adopt HTML5:
- Lowest common denominator – this strategy is the simplest and it’s what I call the ostrich strategy (lets not implement HTML5 at all…). Applying this strategy is to look for the features that are implemented in all the browsers (or all the major browsers) and use them. This of course leave you with small amount of HTML5 specifications (or with non if you target very old browsers).
- Vertical slices – in this strategy you decide that you only target a specific HTML5 functionality and therefore “lose” browsers that don’t implement it. If you do that for public internet applications it might harm your application’s credibility (since it won’t work for all the other browsers). This strategy is more appropriate for targeting mobile devices that is a growing market with less browsers to support and high HTML5 browser adoption.
- Using Polyfills – Polyfills are JavaScript “hacks” that help to integrate HTML5 features into older browsers. For example using Modernizr which “adds” the HTML5 semantic elements (header, footer and etc.) to the DOM can help to implement these elements inside your web application and get a consistent UX across older browsers.
- Using fallbacks strategies – Some elements and APIs can’t be achieved with Polyfills (for example the Video/Audio element). In this case you can use the HTML5 feature but you create a fallback if it isn’t exists. For example adding a Video element can have a fallback into Flash/Silverlight if the Video tag isn’t supported in the browser.
Summary
When you want to adopt HTML5 today you need to pay attention not to break your web application in older browsers and also in newer ones. This can be achieved by imposing some strategies such as the strategies that I mentioned in the post. If you have other strategies that you want to share with me please do so in the comments.
HTML5 Session in VP R&D Forum
Today I delivered a session for decision makers forum about HTML5. I want to thank all the attendees who came to the session! The session included two parts:
- What is HTML5? were I introduced what is HTML5 all about.
- HTML5 Support were I talked about the support in the browsers and the browser wars.
Also I got to answer some very good questions like strategies to implement HTML5 today, WPF/Silverlight against HTML5 and more. If you want to download the slide deck you can go to this link.
Balsamiq Mockups Tool
As part of a project that I’m currently managing and developing, I was in a need to design UI mockup for a sample web application. I didn’t want to use Visio or Word for this task since I think that it is an overkill to use such “monsters” for a simple (but very important) task. So I remembered Scott Mitchell’s MSDN Magazine article and his recommendation for the Balsamiq Mockups tool. After I read the article last year, I evaluated the tool in the online demo and it was awesome.
Yesterday, I went to balsamiq web site and downloaded the tool’s trail version. It took me two hours to give life to the mockup that I imagined for the web application and that was it. The tool is SO easy to use, very intuitive and you create mockups “in the speed of light”. Just take a look at samples from Balsamiq Mockups site to get the idea of what you can achieve with the tool:
Once you finish to create the mockup, you can export it as an image or save it. I really enjoyed the second chance to use this brilliant tool. Now my design is at the hands of a graphical designer who get the picture of how the sample application needs to look and feel.
One last thing, the tool is a commercial product and it costs $79 per user license.