The Web Platform

Browsers and Applications

Dean Jackson

World Wide Web Consortium

Welcome Back Browser

Is it back from the dead?

Was it ever dead?

New Web Browsers

• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Impressive Applications

Google Mail

Google Maps

Others

• Suggest / Live Search
• This slide tool
• etc

New Client Technologies

• XSLT
• AJAX
• SVG

Web APIs

• Google
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• Flickr
• Technorati

Mobile Clients

• Huge volume of units shipped/turnover
• Active development
• Committed to standards
• Interesting problems in UI, bandwidth, resources

Alternate Clients

• Dashboard
• Konfabulator
• RSS readers

The Web Platform

... again. This isn't really new technology.

The benefits of the Web as an application platform are well-known.

Web Applications

From here on we'll be mostly talking about the client-side.

W3C

• What is W3C doing?
• What might W3C do soon?
• What should W3C do, and when?

What is W3C doing?

A few things, including

• SVG
• CDF
• XBL

SVG

SVG Tiny is very popular. It's built-in to most phones sold on the European market today and about 50 million SVG phones have been sold.

Meanwhile, the community demanded scripting support in order to build applications.

SVG Tiny 1.1

• shapes
• text
• animation

SVG Tiny 1.2

• shapes
• text
• animation
• gradients
• opacity
• scripting

SVG in the browsers

• Opera
• Firefox
• (Safari)

Interesting Times

• Growth of mobile devices is accelerating
• Adobe acquired Macromedia

CDF

CDF is mixing markup languages into a single document.

Our approach is to build a framework for the general case and a set of profiles for specific combinations.

Primary use case is the mobile market.

CDF Use Cases

The CDF Working Group has published a document of use cases and requirements.

• Some requirements are general for the framework
• Others are specific to multimedia presentation

Status of CDF

CDF is about to release the first draft of an XHTML + SVG multimedia presentation profile.

There is strong participation in the CDF group including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Mozilla, Access, RIM, Vodafone, France Telecom, Opera, Obigo, Ikivo.

XBL

XBL is a mapping from custom markup into presentation and behaviour. The goal is to keep the semantically rich content as close to the user as possible.

XBL Example

  <s:star magnitude="10"/>

  s = doc.createElementNS(SNS, "star");
  s.setAttribute("magnitude", "20");
  s.addEventListener("Supernova", callback, false);

Other technologies

• CSS UI
• XML Events
• VoiceXML
• DOM

What will W3C do?

Web Applications

W3C would like to provide a better programming environment for the Web.

New Interfaces

• Network (HTTP and Socket)
• Timers/Events
• Client-side storage
• monitoring download progress
• file upload
• metadata for media (eg. EXIF for images)

New Interfaces

• filtering of events
• mouse wheels
• mouse capture
• better OM for CSS
• widget library

What should W3C do?

APIs or Documents?

There are people that say the W3C should not be standardizing APIs. Other people say that the API is an essential part of a document.

Either way, the Web will be used as an application platform.

Goals

• To (better) enable the Web as an application platform (on all devices).
• To help users by requiring support for standards in the browser.
• To give developers a better environment.

What are we missing?