Presented at the 2011, Esri Developer Summit, this talk focuses on designing appropriate "experiences" for target platform - desktop, tablet or mobile, as well as how we can leverage HTML5 to do this efficiently.
And we all know Google Loves HTML – Google Apps is a web based version of an office suite, but if that’s not enough, they also wrote a love story about HTML5And recently, on Google has been re-mixing their logo using adding HTML5 – this one is an interactive tribute to 20,000 leagues under the sea
Silverlight FirestarterGu, Tim Heuer, John Papa, Jesse Liberty and other cogniscenti all to try and convince everyone that MS loved Silverlight and that seemed to have worked for a while, until last week’s MVP summit where the ASP.NET team were spotted rollin like this. Anyhow Microsoft clearly loves HTML5 AND Silverlight
Native is for “high touch” things. Web is for low touch.
FaceBook supports 18 native applications – too much! Moving to HTML5… even farmville!
So we have 4 of the largest technology companies agreeing (to some degree) that HTML5 is the future… but
What IS HTML5
For the purposes of this talk I’t really 3
So if we look at a typical page layout… divs and pretty common ID’s and Classes – which mean things to you and I, but not to the machine…
With HTML5, we get new DOM elements, which have semantic meaning.
Allows computers to “understand” the content better
Gradients and rounded corners – help avoid using images on pages. We also have much wider support for web fonts, which now allows
Also WebDB – relational database in the browser.
As well as some other less widely implemented stuff
Google Body Browser in Chrome to see what this is all about.
So – HTML5 brings unicorsand rainbows to the world. Great… just
There are two things to contend with
The second problem is IE
It’s not just that IE does not support HTML5 in any meaningful way, even more important is javascript performanceSo – the latest version of IE is >5 times slower than other more modern browsers. And IE 6 and 7 are more than double that!So the simple answer has been to use Flex of Silverlight
Desktopvs tablets vs phones – very different screen sizes, and user xpectations
This alone means that you need a separate “view” for touch devices – also note that Flex on Android != same app for desktop and mobile!
So – what do we do? Multiple devices, form factors, javascript environments
Since we have different needs for different client devices, lets drop the idea that we can create ONE thing and run it everywhere – use some infrastructure to create optimized views for each device.