AOL pushes ahead with Mobile Web and HTML5
Just came across an article from a few weeks ago on GigaOM that says that AOL’s mobile website will take advantage of HTML5 features when it detects that a mobile device supports them. This is great news for Apple and Google as their mobile operating systems, iOS and Android, each come with web browsers that have some support for HTML5.
This means that AOL thinks that the mobile web is solid replacement for native phone applications. Everyone with a smartphone has a data plan, and everyone who has a regular phone with an internet plan can usually get unlimited internet access for a very low price (I’m paying $10/month for unlimited internet on my non-smartphone). AOL is making long-term bet that HTML5 will be supported and used much more widely and will also be fully supported.
Mobile web-optimized websites are becoming increasingly important and AOL recognizes this. It’s too bad most blogs and websites still haven’t figured that out.
Harder Than I Thought: Putting together a website template
When Adam and I first started creating a website template together, we went for a template targeted towards businesses. We got half-way through when we decided to start on another template, a template for restaurant/cooking websites. Read more
The rise of “app stores”
Ajaxian recently published an editorial talking the rise of app stores for web applications and mobile web applications. They think that proprietary app stores are a hindrance to development and that the open nature of the web is a far better environment for developers in which to sell and market their work. They mention the new Google Chrome Web Store that’s supposed to be coming along soon as a great idea:
Chrome Web Store: The Chrome Web Store is happening. I know of other Web store efforts in various stages of life too. A lot of developers want to get into the app distribution bandwagon, and will be looking at the notion of a “web app” in a new light because of this. This will give a lot of momentum, along with the fact that HTML5 is the first real spec envisioned for “app” functionality versus documents, to the web app movement.
I agree, it’s a good idea.
There is also another new web application store: Chomp, an HTML5 web app store for the iPhone/iPad. Chomp is interesting because it’s targeted for a specific platform rather than just the web. So even with web-based application you still have device divisions because of web browser specific tricks and quirks (such as -web-kit-border, and -moz-border, webkit animations, etc). According to the review of Chomp by ReadWriteWeb,
App discovery on mobile devices is a big challenge. Apple announced in January that iPhone users have downloaded apps 3 billion times and analysts expect the total mobile app ecosystem across all platforms to grow to 50 billion by 2012. That number could be even bigger if it included Web-accessed apps.
Non-smartphone manufacturers such as Samsungand Nokia are wise to be creating and upgrading their app stores. Apple and Google are encouraging competition and forcing the old cellphone players to up their game and improve the user experience of app stores. This is excellent and I can’t wait to see how much the development experience improves for those making j2me applications and web-apps targeted towards NetFront’s browser or other non-Safari/non-Google mobile browsers.
I would also like to see more integration with the desktop using Google’s Chrome web shortcuts or using Mozilla’s Prism container. This would make it attractive to not only build web applications, but web-based desktop application (a la Appcelerator Titanium).
More Mobile Website Design Info
Browser on a mobile phone, Creative Commons licensed image by Johan Larsson
In the last post, I said that I bought a Samsung Impact and am using the NetFront Browser as my web browser. I neglected to mention that I also have tried Opera Mini and I’m trying out the Bolt Browser today. The Bolt Browser is based on the coolest website rendering engine around, WebKit. Google’s Chrome browser is based on it, as well as Apple’s Safari browser. It was a finalist in the CNET Webware 100 Awards in the browsing category and recently it won first place in the Entertainment/Social Networking category of the CTIA E-Tech 2010 Awards.
Read more
Mobile Web and JavaScript, NetFront Browser 3.5
I noticed on Twitter that Amazon is having a jQuery hackfest and @jeresig is going to talk about mobile Javascript. I assume it’s development for the iPhone or for Android. However, there are still some of us who don’t have those fancy smartphones…
I recently bought a cell phone, the Samsung Impact, and it came with ACCESS’s NetFront Browser 3.5. It’s not a fancy smartphone, it isn’t an Android or an iPhone, but it does get the job done. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks to read reddit, the New York Times, the Economist, etc.
Considering how important JavaScript is and how much more important it will be, it’s worth knowing exactly what is and isn’t supported by a mobile browser.
The following are the specs for NetFront Browser 3.5:
- OMA Browsing v2.3
- Scripting
- JavaScript 1.7
- EMCA 262 3rd Edition
- DOM level 1, level 2
- WMLScript (light version of JavaScript)
- Dynamic HTML and AJAX (XML HTTP Request)
- Markup
- CSS1, CSS2.1, CSS3 (partial), CSS MP 1.1
- RSS feeds
- RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0
- Atom 0.3, 1.0
I’m impressed that the browser has support for AJAX! See, you don’t even need a smartphone to have a great Web experience, you just need sites that are designed a little better 
I ran a set of tests for AJAX (XML HTTP Request) support and it appears that the browser really does support AJAX. The dynamic changing of HTML using Javascript appears to work as well.
Finally, here’s a table for touchscreen-specific JavaScript events that are supported by various mobile browsers such as mobile Safari, Blackberry, and NetFront. Hopefully this information encourages other designers to design for older mobile devices that don’t have the luxury of Safari or Android’s browser.
HTML5 Compatibility
There has been some more advertising of HTML5, with Safari and IE9, and everywhere else really.
Microsoft is claiming 100% compatibility with HTML5. I think their marketing department went a bit overboard when they were told to think of ways to sell IE9 to developers. Chris at css3.info clarified what their test results really meant:
The truth of the matter is that whilst IE9 does score 100% in each of the test cases shown by the table, these test cases only test a tiny subset of HTML5 / CSS3 features and there are countless other scenarios and test cases where the other browsers out-perform IE9. Whilst the way the results are presented may be somewhat misleading, nowhere in the publication of the results do Microsoft actually claim 100% compliance with CSS3 or HTML5, and it is not unusual practice for browser vendors to list their results in a manner that show them in a better light than their competitors.
This supports Andrew Greig’s suggestion that HTML5 is turning into a buzzword. To some extent that would be very welcome as it could push Microsoft and other browser makers to fully ensure that HTML5 works, but as we’ve just seen, a marketing department may want to capitalize on the buzzword without providing any substance. Both Apple and Microsoft are using the buzz of HTML5 to increase interest in their browsers:
Another thing that people don’t seem to understand is exactly what HTML5 is. I recently came across Apple’s HTML5 demo. From what I could see (after installing Safari) the only actual elements it uses from the HTML5 specification are the <video> and <canvas> tags. Everything else is is just either running using the new CSS3 standards or kickass Javascript. This just confuses the issue. It turns HTML5 into a buzz word which is counterproductive to the way in which we want this technology to be viewed.
Despite all the hype and excitement over the buzzword HTML5, there are very few templates that are making use of HTML5 and most mainstream websites have not tried any of the features of HTML5. The HTML5 gallery displays some of the smaller websites that are using it.
Here are a few HTML5 resources to help you start using it today:
- Dive Into HTML5, a book on some of the features of html5
- HTML5 Globals and You
- How to create a drop down navigation menu using html5, css3 and javascript
- Validator.nu, experimental markup validation
- The W3C Markup Validator, experimental support for html5
New Analogy for Web Platforms/Services
Platforms as Governments
SovietFacebook-style buildings
Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures has thought of a new analogy for web platforms and services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Apple’s iPhone apps. Basically, we should be thinking of them as governments with the users of the platforms treated as citizens and 3rd-party developers treated as private businesses.
A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn’t happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.
I think Burnham is correct but it is a bit disturbing to think of them that way since they aren’t democratic governments and cave into the demands of citizens only when necessary, such as when Facebook changed the privacy standards in their system.
Once you start thinking about large web platforms as governments, the logical question is what kind of government are they. One thing is for sure – none of these platforms are democracies. They are oligarchies controlled by founders, investors or shareholders. That may not be at all bad. As long as citizens (users) can move freely from one government to another with little switching cost, there is no reason to burden these polities with the inherent inefficiencies of popular democracy.
They may not be all bad but so far, very few services make it easy to emigrate from their platform. The inherent inefficiencies of popular democracy can delay bad decisions. Inefficiency means leaving enough time to mull things over and then apply changes. When a company makes fast decision, which Google did with their new Buzz service or Facebook with their privacy settings and news feed, then they lose some credibility and upset many people. They also can upset their shareholders.
Apparently, Facebook is a state in flux. I think this is a great description:
Facebook looks a little like the Russia of Vladimir Putin. Facebook was originally a state economy. The vast majority of the services were provided initially by Facebook. Later, they liberalized their economy with the introduction of the Facebook API. That unleashed a torrent of investment and innovation, but also some bad behavior and unsavory characters. Now the state is reasserting control over the economy with the introduction of Facebook Credits.
An Old Analogy
This reminded me of an old analogy I saw on Coding Horror. It came from a book and it said to think of start ups in terms of soldiers in a war: commandos, a small group of elite soldiers who create as much havoc as possible and establish the beginnings of an operations base; infantry, a larger group who follow orders more closely and try to expand the base; and police, the group of people who try to stablize the base of operations.
Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Commandos parachute behind enemy lines or quietly crawl ashore at night. A start-up’s biggest advantage is speed, and speed is what commandos live for. They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive.
Both analogies are useful and I like them, the new one especially since it really sheds a new light on the subject of what rights people have on a company’s platform.
A Lesson in Website Experience Investment from Google
Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, has written about a new feature of the Google home page; the ability to change the background of the page. Google has apparently just realized, as MySpace and Yahoo and other companies have before them, that users like to customize the appearance of anything they are allowed to.
On MySpace we saw this with the mass customization of whole profiles which were shared with everyone else. On Yahoo we saw this with the customizable home page with multiple themes and widgets, which Google also does with iGoogle.
Now Google finally lets us a touch of personalization to our default simplistic search experience. Yes it’s a small touch, but the home page is the first page that you see and it matters a lot. Google’s goal is still to get you to the most relevant search result, but there’s no need to make it an uninspiring experience. This small touch is a nice way of engaging the user since it requires minimal effort and they can clearly see the result of that effort. Once someone starts using this, they may want to continue to engage with the page by changing the background every time they create a new album.
Cross-promotion: When you upload an image, it gets added to a Picasa web album
This is also a good unobtrusive way of cross-promoting Google’s Picasa photo album organizer. There were two ways that Google could have promoted Picasa. They could have made it much harder to upload images from your computer to contrast it with the really easy way of selecting a photo from a Picasa web album. The other way, which they chose, was to force every uploaded image to be added to a Picasa web album.
If a user doesn’t initially want to use Picasa, they may later decide to since they already have a bunch of background images uploaded. Basically every time you change your background, you’re further investing in the Google experience.
We’ll have to see if this pays off, but I’m betting it will within a few months. In fact, I’m already tempted to use Picasa just because of this new feature.
The obvious lesson here is that customization and personalization are an investment in the experience of the website. The not-so obvious lesson is that you can design things in such a way that a user invests in the website experience in a subtle, automatic way.
Starting our website designing adventure
Found on flickr, image created by Bull3t
Me (Rudolf) and Adam are starting our adventure in website design with some website template designing. We’re currently focusing on supercharged site designs and will later be expanding into designing mobile/cellphone templates and blog templates for WordPress.
On my own blog at NeverFriday, I was using the MovableType blog but I think WordPress is fairly cool. All of the plugins installed easily and I found a fairly nice theme (though we may change it later on). The integration with Google Analytics and Twitter is really really nice. Hopefully it isn’t a struggle to design templates for WordPress 
Our first two templates are for small to mid-sized websites and are meant to showcase a service and multiple products but of course, they can be adapted for any purpose.
To find out when these templates are available for sale follow us on Twitter here!
