HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
An interesting project began a few years ago called PhoneGap (the underlying software is
now called Apache Cordoba). This allows applications to be written for a variety of mo-
bile phone platforms using HTML5 features. Where features are not supported in HTML5
(such as Bluetooth), these are provided via a custom JavaScript library.
PhoneGap applications are packaged as native applications, but underneath they are using
HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
The goal of PhoneGap is to make itself obsolete over time. This has already begun to hap-
pen with APIs such as the GeoLocation API now available natively inside browsers. The
main obstacle that would need to be overcome to make PhoneGap obsolete is security.
HTML based applications run inside the browser sandbox, and are not given access to the
file-system and other aspects of the operating system.
Mobile phone applications also run inside a sandbox, and ask the user for permissions to
perform restricted tasks. There is therefore no reason that web browsers could not adopt
this same model, in fact some browsers already ask the user for permission before allowing
usage of the storage APIs.
