HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
In the example, you can see you're creating a new intent for a user's application to handle the contacts in a user's
address book. Using this API could be helpful if you want to share deals within the ad experience with other friends in
your contacts. For more information on this emerging API, visit
http://w3.org/TR/contacts-api
and always be sure
to check browser support before implementing it in a production campaign.
Proximity Events
Using proximity events, you can handle when specific objects are near your devices. This could be when a user is
near another computer, another device like a phone, or even other physical objects capable of transmitting data to
and from your device. With this API, a physical object's proximity could dispatch an event and share information
with a user's phone. The possibilities for this technology could be extremely helpful for marketers because, for
example, their print campaigns could transmit a deal to users' mobile devices when they're close to the store.
To learn more information on this very emerging API, visit
http://w3.org/TR/2012/WD-proximity-20120712
and
Humidity, Temperature, and Light Events
Lastly, some devices are even giving access to very rich feature sets such as humidity and temperature sensors as
well as an ambient light meter. The possibilities when working with these events could be adjusting the content's
CSS for increased contrast when the device detects that it's outdoors in sunlight. Or if the device can detect that
the temperature is 100 degrees, perhaps the ad's creative tailors specific messaging based on that result. While the
possibilities are endless for these types of dynamic data, the browser support is pretty much nonexistent at the
time of this writing. For more information on these two specs, visit
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap/raw-file/tip/
For more information on the Ambient Light API, visit
http://w3.org/TR/2012/WD-ambient-light-20120802
.
Browser Support
As I've mentioned throughout this chapter, browser support for all of these features is very limited, if available at
all. Pretty much everything in this chapter is the most latest information at the time of writing, so you're being now
warned now: features and specifications change. It's best to work from the latest alpha and beta browsers just to
see what's coming and to frequently check
http://caniuse.com
to see whether these features will be supported in
production versions of the browser as they're released. A really great enhancement in most browsers nowadays
is the process of auto-updating, which means as a user opens and closes their browser, the browser will check to see
whether an update is available and process this update transparently to the end user the next time they open the
browser. This is such a simple but immensely huge step forward for all browser manufactures and the web as a
whole because you never want to see older browsers lingering around, like with the legacy support that was needed
for IE 6. The quicker the masses adopt new versions of browsers, the less work web designers and developers need to
do when supporting outdated versions and ultimately the less money client's have to spend to fund the relic browser
development.
