Mobile HTML5

Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.

Dan Kantor wrote a piece for Ajaxian about the “write once, run anywhere” dream and how HTML5 is a big step along that path.  

Dan’s execution on Extension.fm feels like he reached two years into the future, and pulled an app back in time to show us all what the future of web development could be.  In doing so, the tradeoff Dan made was to restrict compatibility to Chrome-only until other browsers become more standards-compliant.  

The article is a great case study on the state of modern browsers, and you can see visions of the future peeking out.  Read Dan’s piece first, and then revisit a true classic: Joel on Software’s “Strategy Letter IV” from September 2007. Go read the whole thing, but for people with no attention span, here’s the best part (long excerpt I know, but necessary — and funny):

Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.

And the NewSDK people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer Facebook/Twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.

Dan’s not building an SDK obviously, but he is building a killer app that is an example of what’s possible on the HTML5 platform with a few browser hooks from Chrome. Dan’s case study exemplifying the power of HTML5 is, for me, a clear look at the future of app development and a great example of where Joel’s NewSDK revolution will come from.

Funny enough, in 2007 Joel assumed that NewSDK would be a private company (like the Win32 API of the 90s) but in its seems that the outcome may be a open standards body, the W3C, with the HTML5 development largely led by Ian Hickson of Google. So, Joel nailed the evolution (jury’s still out technically, but I think Joel nailed it), but he missed on the players.