CHAPTER 13  THE FUTURE OF HTML5

This overrides the behavior of the default browser interface and handles the event yourself. Until the mobile events are standardized, it is recommended that you consult the documentation of the devices you are targeting with your application.

Peer-to-Peer Networking

We haven’t seen the end of advanced networking in web applications either. With both HTTP and WebSocket, there is a client (the browser or other user agent) and a server (the host of the URL). Peer-to- peer (P2P) networking allows clients to communicate directly. This is often more efficient than sending all data through a server. Efficiency, of course, reduces hosting costs and improves application performance. P2P should make for faster multiplayer games and collaboration software.

Another immediate application for P2P combined with the device element is efficient video chat in HTML5. In peer-to-peer video chat, conversation partners would be able to send data directly to each other without routing through a central server. Outside of HTML5, P2P video chat has been wildly popular in applications like Skype. Because of the high bandwidth required by streaming video, it is likely that neither of those applications would have been possible without peer-to-peer communication.

Browser vendors are already experimenting with P2P networking, such as Opera’s Unite technology, which hosts a simplified web server directly in the browser. Opera Unite lets users create and expose services to their peers for chatting, file sharing, and document collaboration.

Of course, P2P networking for the web will require a protocol that takes security and network intermediaries into consideration as well as an API for developers to program against.

Ultimate Direction

So far, we have focused on empowering developers to build powerful HTML5 applications. A different perspective is to consider how HTML5 empowers users of web applications. Many HTML5 features allow you to remove or reduce the complexity of scripts and perform feats that previously required plugins. HTML5 video, for example, lets you specify controls, autoplay, buffering behavior, and a placeholder image without any JavaScript. With CSS3, you can move animation and effects from scripts to styles. This declarative code makes applications more amenable to user styles and ultimately returns power to the people who use your creations every day.

You’ve seen how the development tools in all the modern browsers are exposing information about HTML5 features like storage, as well as critically important JavaScript debugging, profiling, and command-line evaluation. HTML5 development will trend toward simplicity, declarative code, and lightweight tools within the browsers or web applications themselves.

Google feels confident enough about the continuing evolution of HTML that it has released the Google Chrome operating system, a streamlined operating system built around a browser and media player. Google’s operating system aims to include enough functionality using HTML APIs to provide a compelling user experience where applications are delivered using the standardized web infrastructure. Similarly, Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will not support any plugins in the new Metro mode, including the company’s own Silverlight plugin.

Summary

In this book, you have learned how to use powerful HTML5 APIs. Use them wisely!

In this final chapter, we have given you a glimpse of some of the things that are coming, such as 3D graphics, the new device element, touch events, and P2P networking. Development of HTML5 shows no sign of slowing down and will be very exciting to watch.

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CHAPTER 13  THE FUTURE OF HTML5

Think back for a minute. For those of you who have been surfing the Web, or perhaps even developing for it for ten years or more, consider how far HTML technology has come in just the last few years. Ten years ago, “professional HTML programming” meant learning to use the new features of HTML 4. Cutting edge developers at the time were just discovering dynamic page updates and XMLHttpRequests. The term “Ajax” was still years from introduction, even if the techniques Ajax described were starting to gain traction. Much of the professional programming in browsers was written to wrangle frames and manipulate image maps.

Today, functions that took pages of script can be performed with just markup. Multiple new methods for communication and interaction are now available to all those willing to download one of the many free HTML5 browsers, crack open their favorite text editors, and try their hands at professional HTML5 programming.

We hope you have enjoyed this exploration of web development, and we hope it has inspired your creativity. We look forward to writing about the innovations you create using HTML5 a decade from now.

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