Mozilla has jumped into the shark-infested debate about whether or not HTML5 can compete with platform native apps. Chris Heilmann, Mozilla’s Principal Evangelist for HTML5, has a new post on the Mozilla Hacks blog that challenges many “false assumptions” about HTML5.
Heilmann’s post is not so much about which you ought to use for your next app — right now that depends on what you’re building — rather it attempts to clear the air about just what HTML5 actually can and cannot do.
Among the things Heilmann covers are the myths that HTML5 has performance problems, that it can’t work offline and that developers can’t make money building HTML5 apps.
Along the way Heilmann also acknowledges where platform-native apps have the lead, namely, access to device APIs. It’s not a shortcoming of HTML5 that iOS and Android both prevent web apps from accessing many APIs native apps can use, but it is a practical reality that keeps many developers building native apps for the time being. As Heilmann writes, “in essence HTML5 is a Formula 1 car that has to drive on a dirt road whilst dragging a lot of extra payload given to it by the operating system without a chance to work around that — for now.”
The qualifier, “for now,” is the key part of that analogy. Not only are platforms slowly adding more HTML5 support to their native browsers, we’ve also seen increased support for accessing device capabilities — like GPS or the camera — through web apps. And of course Mozilla is building its own mobile OS which will consist exclusively of HTML5 apps.
It may be some time before app developers start favoring the web over platform-specific apps, but as Heilmann points out this is hardly the first time the web has taken over from a closed system: “historically, closed platforms came and went and the web is still going strong.”
Google has added a new sharing feature to Google Drive — the company’s cloud storage service — that makes it easy to share your files with friends on Google+.
Now you can quickly share a file from Google Drive to Google+ and people in your Google+ circles will be able to open documents, play videos and view presentations right from your Google+ stream.
Google Drive is a key part of fulfilling the company’s vision for a cloud-centric computing future, but so far Drive remains on the periphery of most Google services. While the new Google+ sharing features may be a small change, it shows where Drive is headed — into all your Google services.
The new sharing features for Drive files are easy to use. When you click the “share” button next to a file in Google Drive (or right-click a file and select “share”) you’ll see a new Google+ icon alongside the familiar Twitter and Facebook options. Note that sharing a Drive file through Google+ will not change the sharing settings of that file. Your friends on Google+ will only be able to view or edit it if you’ve given them permission to do so in Google Drive. If you’d like anyone to be able to access the document, select the “public on the web” visibility option. The Google Drive documentation has full details on sharing.
Once your document is added to Google+ anyone with permission to do so will see thumbnails for your shared documents or music files, and there’s an inline player for videos and presentations.
The sharing features work the other way was well — you can paste a Google Drive URL into a Google+ post and anyone looking at the feed will see the same thumbnails and players.
Building websites with scissors and glue. Image: Webcredible
Web developers are still figuring out the best tools and workflows for creating responsive websites, including falling back to good-old pen and paper. As we noted earlier, Zurb released a nice set of responsive sketchsheets — paper templates for sketching out responsive layouts.
That’s not the only paper trick we’ve seen lately. Alexander Baxevanis of Webcredible recently posted another idea about how paper can come in handy to mock up a responsive site. Baxevanis’ post walks through how he and his team printed out a paper model of their site to wireframe and mock up a new responsive website:
I started by printing out screenshots of some of our most important pages. Each person was given one or more of these screenshots, some empty paper, a pair of scissors and some glue. The only instructions I gave was to try and slice up and rearrange page content so that it fits in a single-column layout.
Baxevanis touts the method’s speed and flexibility since the there’s less sketching and, with each content element cut out separately, it’s easy to rearrange everything and try various combinations.
Naturally there are some limits to how well you can mockup a site using paper, though Baxevanis does offer a clever solution to one problem — fold a piece of paper showing a long list of stuff to mimic a drop-down menu. The main caveat is that this probably works best if you’re starting with an existing desktop site; those adopting a mobile-first approach would probably need to make some modifications to the process.
For more details and more images of the mockups, head on over to Webcredible’s blog.
Google is introducing a new way to compose messages in Gmail. Instead of loading a whole new “compose” page, you can now start a new email from wherever you are in a popup window. The window isn’t actually a new browser window, but rather an overlay on the Gmail page. The new compose looks like a Gmail chat window, though the compose version is a bit bigger.
The new compose window is rolling out as a preview today. If you’d like to try it out just click the compose button and Gmail will ask if you’d like to try the “new compose experience.” Hit that link and you’ll get the new window.
The change makes it easier to reference old emails while you’re composing a new one, since you don’t need to leave whatever page you’re viewing just to write a new message.
The overlay window also means you can search or keep an eye on incoming mail while you write your new message. Having compose in its own window also means you can write multiple messages at once and even minimize a message to finish it later.
The window within a window model mimics what you’d find on traditional desktop mail apps, and Gmail has also borrowed another feature of desktop mail applications — drag and drop “address chips.” The drag and drop features are nice, but the “chips” mean that your recipients’ email addresses are collapsed to just the name, which can be annoying if you need to double-check that you’re emailing, for example, a person’s work address instead of a home address.
For now the new compose window is optional, but Google says that it will, after some “finishing touches,” be rolling out to everyone “over the coming months.”
[Update: If you really like the new compose window, Google Operating System's Alex Chitu points out that, with a little URL hacking, you can open any message in a compose-style window. Check out Google Operating System for full details.]
People who walked in snow also bought jackets, would you like a value proposition jacket? Image: rabiem22/Flickr.
Microsoft continues to take a beating for its decision to enable the Do Not Track privacy setting by default in the company’s brand-new Internet Explorer 10.
IE 10 has only been on the web for a few days (see Webmonkey’s IE 10 review), but Yahoo has already released a statement saying that the company will ignore the Do Not Track header when broadcast by IE 10 users. Yahoo is not the first to take exception to Microsoft’s decision to turn Do Not Track on by default — the Apache web server may ignore IE 10′s DNT header as well — but it’s the biggest site so far to square off against Microsoft.
This most recent squabble comes despite the fact that Microsoft and Yahoo are partners and that Yahoo has previously said it would support Do Not Track.
The Do Not Track header is a proposed web standard for browsers to tell servers that the user does not want to be tracked by advertisers. DNT is supported by all the major web browsers, but only Microsoft has elected to make DNT part of the browser’s default setup. That means that all IE 10 users will be telling advertisers to back off, which some argue is not what DNT was intended to do.
The problem for Yahoo is that it risks ignoring not just a coming web standard, but the wishes of those users who would have opted in to Do Not Track even if it were off by default. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s VP of Legal & Corporate Affairs, recently said that turning on Do Not Track “reflects what our customers want: 75 percent of the consumers we surveyed in the U.S. and Europe said they wanted DNT on by default.”
On the first count Yahoo’s jargon-laden policy announcement seems to be saying that the company believes Microsoft is violating the W3C draft of Do Not Track. “Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction,” says the Yahoo Policy blog. “In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them.”
The latter statement seems to be a blanket argument against DNT existing at all — a common argument from companies that make the majority of their money from advertising — rather than anything specific about IE 10, especially given that Microsoft appears to be conforming to the current draft of the spec. I contacted Yahoo asking for clarification about the company’s position on web standards support, but the company did not respond before this story was published. [Update: Yahoo's Sara Gorman tells Webmonkey that "Yahoo does not consider the current Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 or Windows 8 install flows to represent explicit user consent with respect to Do Not Track."]
Yahoo’s complaint, along with similar complaints from Apache and others comes down to this: Is Microsoft violating the DNT spec by turning it on by default?
Here’s what the spec says: “The goal of this protocol is to allow a user to express their personal preference regarding tracking … key to that notion of expression is that it must reflect the user’s preference, not the preference of some institutional or network-imposed mechanism outside the user’s control.”
That certainly sounds like it backs up Yahoo’s decision, and puts Microsoft in the wrong. But the spec continues:
We do not specify how that preference is enabled: each implementation is responsible for determining the user experience by which this preference is enabled.
For example, a user might select a check-box in their user agent’s configuration, install a plug-in or extension that is specifically designed to add a tracking preference expression, or make a choice for privacy that then implicitly includes a tracking preference (e.g., Privacy settings: high) (emphasis mine).
For Internet Explorer 10 Microsoft’s setup dialog offers the user two choices: Express settings and Customize. Choosing the Express option clearly states that it turns on the DNT header and would appear to comply with the wording of the current spec since it gives users a choice.
The cynical might be tempted to say Yahoo and other ad companies are nervous that DNT is actually going to catch on and may well hurt their bottom line, but to be fair Yahoo isn’t alone in saying that Microsoft is violating the proposed spec. Mozilla, which originally created Do Not Track, has argued in the past that Microsoft is abusing DNT with IE 10.
In the end it might not matter. The DNT specification has become a joke. It has seriously been proposed that one of the “Permitted Uses for Third Parties and Service Providers” be “marketing.” So one of the permitted uses for Do Not Track might be to allow advertisers to track you.
If that’s not crazy enough for you consider that most online ad companies are not planning to interpret the “Do Not Track” header to mean “stop collecting data.” Instead most advertisers plan stop showing you targeted ads, but continue to collect data and track what you’re doing on the web.
If that sounds insane, well, it is. But the reality is you are being tracked and you will continue to be tracked unless you do something about it.
If you’d like to be in charge of which data is collected about you and you’d like to actually stop advertisers from tracking you, you’re going to have to do it yourself using add-ons like Ghostery or Do Not Track Plus. See our earlier post, Secure Your Browser: Add-Ons to Stop Web Tracking, for more details on how to stop tracking without worrying about who supports or doesn’t support a still unfinished, potentially heavily compromised web standards proposal.
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