WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Deliverable number 1.1.4.1 State-of-the art, html5-standard Author(s): Olli Nurmi Confidentiality: Public Date and status: 7.9.2011 - Status: Version 1.0 This work was supported by TEKES as part of the next Media programme of TIVIT (Finnish Strategic Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation in the field of ICT) Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) Version history: Version Date State Author(s) OR Remarks (draft/ /update/ final) Editor/Contributors 0.9 30.6.2011 draft Olli Nurmi 1.0 1.9.2011 update Olli Nurmi 1.1 28.9.2011 final Olli Nurmi 1.2 4.10.2011 final Olli Nurmi Issues about Onix is removed to separate deliverable next Media www.nextmedia.fi www.tivit.fi WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 1 (12) STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) Table of Contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3 1.1 Web browsers ................................................................................................. 3 1.2 HTML5 – an open standard ............................................................................ 4 1.3 CSS - Cascading Style Sheets ....................................................................... 6 1.4 HTML5 vs native applications ......................................................................... 6 2 HTML5/CSS3 standards ......................................................................................... 7 2.1 Implications to HTML5-newspaper reader ...................................................... 8 3 Examples of HTML5 applications ........................................................................... 9 3.1 Kindle Cloud Reader ....................................................................................... 9 3.2 Financial Times ............................................................................................. 11 3.3 Facebook Project Spartan ............................................................................ 12 4 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 12 WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 2 (12) STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) 1 Introduction The technology development in the eReading project has two focus areas: news services and book reading services. In these context the evolving HTML5/CSS3 - standards are of importance. This report summarizes briefly the status of those standard. In this chapter we introduce some of the key areas of web technology to the reader. 1.1 Web browsers A web browser engine is a software component that takes marked up content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer. A web browser engine is typically embedded in web browsers, e-mail clients, on-line help systems or other applications that require the displaying (and editing) of web content. Currently the web browsers are split into a user interface and an engine. The engine does most of the work. It essentially takes a URL and a screen rectangle as arguments. It then retrieves the document corresponding to the URL and paints a graphical representation of it on the given rectangle. The user interface provides the menu bar, address bar, status bar, bookmark manager, history and preferences window among other things. It embeds the engine and serves as an interface between the user and the engine. Figure 1.Usage share of web browsers. WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 3 (12) STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) 1.2 HTML5 – an open standard HTML5 is widely used to refer to modern Web technologies. HTML has been in continuous evolution since it was introduced to the Internet in the early 1990s. Some features were introduced in specifications; others were introduced in software releases. In some respects, implementations have converged with specifications and standards, but in other ways, they continue to diverge. HTML5 is an open standard. This means that anyone can use it to create what they wish. Critical, however, is the fact that HTML5 supports not only animations, video, and audio, but also a host of other functions, enabling people to build what look like complete applications within a Web page. You can turn a page into a ebook reader, music player, or game player -- no app store required. The promise of HTML5 is to be able to write Web-based applications once and deliver them across a variety of mobile platforms and devices without native development work. HTML5 is now supported by most recent versions of smartphones and tablets. Web apps written in HTML5 generally don‟t have desktop-and-mouse-oriented scroll bars but have mobile device-native pinch, flip, swipe, and other gesture- based navigation capabilities. HTML5 is viewed by many as the future of mobile development. There are currently limits to the device-native capabilities supported by HTML5. For example, access to the camera functionality on various mobile devices is usually lacking. HTML5 is defined in a way that it is backwards compatible with the way user agents handle deployed content. To keep the authoring language relatively simple several elements and attributes are not included, such as presentational elements that are better dealt with using CSS. The HTML5 specification will not be considered finished before there are at least two complete implementations of the specification. A test suite will be used to measure completeness of the implementations. This approach differs from previous versions of HTML, where the final specification would typically be approved by a committee before being actually implemented. The goal of this change is to ensure that the specification is implementable, and usable by authors once it is finished. According to the W3C timetable, it was estimated that HTML5 would reach W3C Recommendation by late 2010. However, the First Public Working Draft estimate was missed by 8 months, and Last Call and Candidate Recommendation were expected to be reached in 2008, but as of January 2011 HTML5 is still at Working Draft stage in the W3C. HTML5 has been at Last Call in the WHATWG since October 2009. Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012. The criterion for the specification becoming a W3C Recommendation is “two 100% complete and WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 4 (12) STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) fully interoperable implementations”. In an interview with TechRepublic, Hickson guessed that this would occur in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products. The actual standard is not officially expected to be completed until 2020, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won‟t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features. Many current browsers already support several of the new features in the draft specifications. An HTML5 test suite is also under development that, while it does not test all of the new features nor the functionality of those it does detect, rates browsers' support. New tests are expected to be added to the suite as time goes by. Browser HTML5 Test Points Apple Safari 293/450 Google Chrome 341/450 Internet Explorer 141/450 Mozilla Firefox 313/450 Opera 286/450 Figure 2 HTML5 support of some browsers tested by http://html5test.com. source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers. However, many Internet users continue using older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and 8, so HTML5 does not work with a significant fraction of browsers still in use. Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, which had a 57% market share as of December 2010, does not support HTML5 outside of version 9 which was released to the public on March 14, 2011. HTML5 introduces technology improvements to HTML that help mobile developers by adding geo-location, user interface tools, and access to smartphone‟s cameras and sensors. HTML5 also adds media playback, offline storage, and 2D graphics capabilities. Media Playback The days of needing Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime to play music or view a video are over. With HTML5, plug-ins are no longer needed. The HTML quotation tags can be used to directly embed media. Offline Support With HTML5 (and a free SQL Lite database), it‟s now possible for mobile developers to store data locally on the device. Interruptions in connectivity no WP 1 AND EREADING AND D 1.1.4.1 5 (12) STATE-OF-THE-ART-STANDARDS Next Media - a Tivit Programme Phase 2 (1.1-31.12.2011) longer need to affect. Capabilities such as caching of logic and local storage of data make this possible. 2D Graphics Capabilities The canvas element is now part of HTML5 and allows for dynamic rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. It is designed to make it easy to add graphics to a page without using plug-ins. 1.3 CSS - Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. CSS is designed primarily to enable the