HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
HTML5 in the Enterprise
With a clearer picture of the mobile device and browser landscape, you next need to
determine which W3C specifications the various browsers support and how you can
use them today. In terms of enterprise development, certain client-side APIs are con‐
sidered the advanced building blocks of today's mobile web applications: Geolocation,
WebSocket, Web Storage, Device Orientation, and Web Workers. These are the speci‐
fications on last call from the W3C; close to finalized, they are stable (for the most part)
and adopted in today's mobile browsers. Of course, you can find many other great spec‐
ifications like the Media Capture API, which allows access to the device audio, video,
and images, but this topic tries to stay focused on specifications that are widely sup‐
ported across all browsers today.
Table 2-2
details the support of the building-block APIs in the five leading or upcoming
mobile platforms. All of these mobile browsers are considered grade A, B, or C.
Throughout the topic and at
http://html5e.org
,
I will refer to this group of specifications
and browsers as
HTML5 Enterprise
or
HTML5e
to easily identify and build upon the
same specifications and browsers across mobile and desktop environments.
Table 2-2. HTML5 Enterprise (HTML5e) mobile support
Browser Geolocation WebSocket Web Storage Device Orientation Web Workers
Mobile Safari Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Android Yes No Yes Yes No
Mobile IE Yes Yes
a
Yes No Yes
a
Opera Mobile Yes Mixed
b
Yes Mixed
c
Yes
Mobile Firefox Yes
Mixed
b
Yes Yes Yes
a
Mobile IE from Windows Phone 7.5 does not support these, but Windows 8 and above does.
b
Both Mozilla and Opera have temporarily disabled WebSockets due to security issues with the protocol.
c
Opera Mobile for Android has experimental support.
As you can see in
Table 2-2
, Mobile Firefox and Safari are the clear winners in terms of
broad support, with Opera Mobile coming in at a close third. Android still has some
work to do, and version 4 is looking much better. Likewise, Mobile IE has much better
HTML5 support in IE10, but IE9 focused mainly on the “same markup” approach: trying
to get things right in regard to HTML5-related markup and the IE rendering engine.
For the latest browser HTML5 support information, check out
http://
