2011 marks my 7th year of developing content in the Wild West that is the mobile device ecosystem. The experience has sometimes been like building sand castles – where tides of disruptive technologies come along and wipe out what you’ve worked so hard to build. At other times, the efforts have been buoyant, and the incoming tide enabled a rapid rise. This is typical with tech, but the scale and pace of the changes in mobile has been dizzying.
One of these recent tides was the rapid distribution of WebKit-based mobile browsers that now ship on many of the popular smartphones. WebKit, developed by Apple and eventually open-sourced, is one of the many significant contributions the folks at Apple have brought the industry. Mobile web developers have been largely cheering WebKit adoption, hoping it will finally provide a single, broadly reaching mobile platform. Unfortunately, WebKit is only the underlying layout engine – not a browser. And while we’ve seen how a common layout engine has made it easier to build a mobile site that delivers a similar experience across a range of devices, there are many more pieces to this constantly evolving puzzle that keep challenging developers.
Today, HTML5 is the buzzword dominating industry headlines. The HTML5 standard aspires to corral the chaos of the mobile web, in a way than even a layout engine monopoly could not provide. Indeed, the emergence of an all-unifying web standard is buzz-worthy, but HTML5 has been in development for a number of years and is still a work in progress. To show HTML5 is a reality now, there are already publications, showcases and awards dedicated to HTML5 sites and apps. However, if you look closely, most of the so-called ‘HTML5 sites’ are built with liberal use of JavaScript and CSS3, and with minimal, if any, actual HTML5 elements. In essence, HTML5 to-date is largely an all-encompassing marketing term. This is great publicity for the HTML standard, but to call most content available today ‘HTML5,’ strikes me a little like calling a car with power windows an ‘electric vehicle’.
In the midst of the HTML5 hype, developers are scratching their heads trying to understand why some JavaScript functions behave much worse with Android 2.2 than with 2.1, or why uploading a photo is not possible from within the Safari browser, but works great on many Android devices. They may even be wondering whether it is faster to get a lat/long using the stars and a sextant than from Blackberry’s GPS API. Simply put, the practical reality facing most developers is that neither HTML5 nor the rising market share of WebKit-based browsers is making things simple today. As a result, some experts advise developers to utilize a ‘progressive’ approach. This means developers should reserve the use of advanced features for the ‘nice to have’ aspects of a mobile site. With this approach, if the fancy stuff doesn’t work on some devices, at least the main functionality should still work as expected.
So if going to market with experimental products is not an option, the challenges presented by the mobile web environment are still daunting. Yes, that’s truly the state of mobile web environment today – give it the ole’ college try and hope for the best. Or better yet, find someone who’s been through this guess-and-check process a few times, and took good notes.
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Steve Paddon is VP of Products and Services at Trilibis Mobile. This is his first guest post on RCR Unplugged.