Peter Lubbers - Pro HTML 5 Programming

CHAPTER 11 ■ THE FUTURE OF HTML5
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 Firefox and WebKit 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 announced the
imminent release of the Google Chrome operating system, a streamlined operating system built around
a browser and media player. Expected in late 2010, 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.
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.
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.
267