HTML5 Archive

Earlier this evening, I was reminded of just how primitive the HTML5 support was in Firefox 3.5/3.6. While we have seen three major version releases since 3.5, it was actually still the latest version of Firefox less than 6 months ago (and was that way for almost 2 years). Therefore, Firefox 3.5.x still holds a decent amount of market share (probably as much as, if not more than IE6 did a year or two ago). Looking at a handful of websites for which I have analytics data, versions of Firefox prior to 4 still accounted for anywhere between 2% and 15% of the total visits to those sites last month. With all of that information, it’s probably still important to make sure your sites work in versions of Firefox as far back as 3.5.

There are two somewhat major gotchas in the way Firefox 3.x handled HTML5. The first is easily fixed with a few lines of CSS. The second can only really be fixed if you rewrite some of your HTML. Continue reading “Firefox and HTML5 Compatibility” »

Although we are still a ways away from being able to use HTML5 and CSS3 to their full potential, some really neat things are being done with them right now. In case you missed the news last week, a new, Web-based version of the wildly popular game Angry Birds was unveiled. For the most part, that application is built using HTML5 and JavaScript (relying heavily on the new <canvas> element and all of its power).

There was some minor controversy over the game, after it was discovered that it still requires Flash in order to play the game (to produce the sounds and music for the game rather than using HTML5 audio), but there are some potentially valid reasons for that. Continue reading “What’s New With HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript?” »

You’ve probably already heard about this, but in case you haven’t, I wanted to share this. Google’s engineers have done a quick port of a Java version of the classic Quake II video game so that it works strictly with HTML5 resources. No plugins are needed to play Quake II in your browser.

I’ve seen a few people talk about the fact that it’s not extremely impressive to port a game as old as Quake II into HTML5. However, from my standpoint, it’s a pretty incredible achievement. Sure, Quake II isn’t the most advanced game in the world, and Flash is probably capable of quite a bit more right now (though, judging from 99% of the games currently available in Flash, I’m not sure about that). However, the fact that this game can run without Flash (in HTML5, which means it will probably work extremely well on the iPhone and iPad before much longer), means that the possibilities for doing similar, tangentially-related projects. Continue reading “Frag! Google Ports Quake II to HTML5” »