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HTML5 Weekly

Issue #29 - March 14, 2012

News and Latest Developments

The latest version of Mozilla's browser is out and version 11 brings an on the fly CSS style editor, a 3D 'tilt' view of page source for developers, and add-on syncing between multiple installs. It also gets SPDY support (though turned off by default for now, use about:config to test).
Over at VMware, they've been working on a prototype called 'WSX' that brings VMware hosted VMs to your tablets, smart phones, and other browsers. It leans heavily on HTML5 Canvas and WebSockets.
Tethering apps have a checked history on the iPhone and other iOS devices, but 'Tether' has come up with a clever way of doing it all using HTML5 in the Mobile Safari browser. How? A proxy and two WebSockets!

Reading

Googler Ilmari Heikkinen shows us how to use the 3D positional audio feature from the Web Audio API alongside WebGL scenes. An excellent article with some superb demos; I recommend this even if the topic isn't your bag.
A killer feature of HTML5 is JavaScript-free client-side form validation and Peter Gasston shows off how to lean on those features using CSS3 to put together interesting UI effects.
At the Mozilla Hacks blog, Chris Heilmann, Mozilla's key HTML5 evangelist, argues that we have to stop advocating 'localStorage' as a great way to store data due to its poor performance.
Nicholas C Zakas responds to Chris Heilmann's article about localStorage.
Alex Danilo of Google shows off a new feature from HTML5 recently implemented in Chromium: scoped stylesheets. They let a page author limit style rules to only a select portion of a page by using the 'scoped' attribute on style elements.
A handy draft document from the W3C digging into the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 documents and how HTML5 differs from earlier HTML standards overall.
No deep technical stuff here, but a pondering on the role of HTML5 in gaming by Jussi Kalliokoski.

Watching

Code, Libraries and Tools

Ringmark is a web-based test suite that measures how well a mobile browser supports the capabilities modern mobile web apps require. It's organized into 'rings' where each extra ring brings even more challenging tests.
tQuery is a thin library on top of three.js (a popular JavaScript 3D library) that mimics jQuery's style of providing an easy to use, abstracted API.
PlayN is a cross-platform game library that allows you to work on a single Java codebase that can then run in HTML5, Java, Android and Flash. It uses Google's GWT compiler.
Want to know when your connection is going over a SPDY link when using Chrome? Guillermo Rauch has an extension for you.

Demos

VIP 2 was a contest-winning demoscene demo created by Popsy Team back in 2000 and it has been ported from C++/OpenGL to JavaScript and WebGL using the Mandreel framework.
TechCrunch highlights a new Nokia maps 'app' that's available on iOS and Android in the shape of an HTML5 powered web site. It looks good and has navigation support. I found it worked super fast on my desktop Chrome browser too!

Last but not least..

Somehow I missed its initial announcement but the EXOdesk is a desk containing a 40 inch touch panel which aims to run HTML5 applications. It seems highly conceptual but they've just updated their blog with development tools you can download so, who knows?
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