Real progressive enhancement

Chris&an HeilmannFOWA, London, October 2010

HTML5

Beware of truisms!

HTML5 does not mean building apps for iPad, iPhone and Android.

Staying in the comfort zone.

Building for the web means open development.

http://www.zhuoqun.net/html/y2008/1103.html

http://icant.co.uk/articles/seven-rules-of-unobtrusive-javascript/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwsDKaalgq8&

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiuT0y0KR6I

Easy YouTube

You can leave now - I don’t need you any longer to watch my videos!

““

HTML5 means moving from hacks to web applications.

The web is a scary place.

A constantly upgrading web?

IE6+Large Organisations=BFF

http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx?epref=ie6upgrade

Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them.  There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure.

It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems.  Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users.

To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users.

And this is why we need progressive enhancement.

Which is not “making it work for IE6”.

Instead it is “test for support before you apply”

http://www.modernizr.com/

http://github.com/phiggins42/has.js

[geomaker]

http://icant.co.uk/geomaker/index.php

http://uk-house-prices.com/

For a lot of new developers, this looks like extra effort.

Instead we produce low quality fallbacks.

New technologies can be safely applied with a few lines of code.

Take local storage for example. 15MB cookies!

http://github.com/codepo8/firehose-research/

We built all these cool widgets...

Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to use them?

http://express.davglass.com/

node.js + express.js + YUI3 = Progressive Enhancement win!

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/09/29/video-glass-node/

Even more interesting - today’s widgets are already tomorrow’s native controls.

type=”range”

type=”date”

type=”color”

type=”file”

<datalist>

Re-use of learnings.

CSS3Animation

Transitionand

On-demand loading allows for enhanced support without overhead.

YUI’s intrinsic Loader now supports capability‐based loading. We’re leveraging this new feature to avoid shipping IE‐specific code in the Dom module to non‐IE browsers, a performance/k‐weight boost that will benefit all users of modern browsers with no code change required.

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/07/26/3-2-0pr1/

Last but not least, it is time to think about our development stack.

http://revdancatt.com/2010/09/27/a-users-guide-to-websites-part-1-if-it-wasnt-broken-why-fix-it-2/

http://yuiblog.com/crockford/ “Loopage”

The future of web apps is being forged right now.

Be part of the movement for a better web for all.

Come and talk to us, to Google, to Apple, to Mozilla, to Opera, to Microsoft...Your input matters!

Christian Heilmann http://wait-till-i.com http://developer-evangelism.com http://twitter.com/codepo8

Thanks!