The Road Ahead - HTML5 Mastery: Semantics, Standards, and Styling - page 332

C H A P T E R 8
The Road Ahead
There are many fringes to HTML5, areas that are still being molded and sculpted toward
a standard perfection, but to a large degree the road ahead has less to do with HTML5 and
more to do with where HTML5 will be used. It is a connected world, and more people are
connected via cellular phones than desktop computers. In the years ahead, Internet-en-
abled smartphones will likely spread to the masses, like low-end “dumb” mobile phones
did years ago, 1 and the Web will have visitors who are on the move, surfing web pages
on crowded buses, on street corners, in cafés, in restaurants, and, dare I say it, in movie
theaters. Mobile devices offer special challenges for you, the web developer/designer.
The screen resolution is more complicated, and the screen real estate is more confined,
but with a helping hand from CSS3, HTML5 is well supported on contemporary smart-
phones. What you learned from prior chapters applies here, albeit things may be a little
slower and there is a smaller screen area to work with, but those are the design challenges
to work around, and they are counterbalanced by the unique possibilities of the mobile
space. This chapter will discuss those challenges and possibilities and finish with a dis-
cussion of some last corners of the HTML5 specification.
Challenges of the mobile Web
Over the past few years, a host of new Internet-enabled handheld devices have become
widely available. While Internet-enabled mobile devices have been around since the
1990s, they arguably first became widely viewed as a viable platform for viewing web
pages (as opposed to just using them for e-mail, for instance) with the introduction of
the iPhone and its large colorful touchscreen in 2007. What followed was an explosion
of large touchscreen devices running iOS, Google's Android OS, Microsoft's Windows
Phone 7 platform, and more. Designing for the Web suddenly became a multifaceted pro-
cess, many times more so than before. A web page might be viewed on a large wide-
screen display in a desktop computer environment with loads of processing power, but
it may be viewed on a small handheld mobile phone, with processor constraints and a