Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability
February 8, 2008 – 2:20 pmMacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is hot on its heels with WHATWG conforming offline storage slated for inclusion in the next Firefox 3 beta.
Ryan Stewart speculates that these new features prove that Apple is “very serious about an RIA strategy that seems browser based.” They still have a long way to go to compete with the likes of AIR and Prism. In particular, there is no mention of a mechanism for creating desktop shortcuts for web applications so they can run in their own process, independent of the browser (perhaps that’s what Ryan means when he describes Apple’s approach as “browser based”). What’s more, the SQL storage (which was integrated months ago into the WebKit engine that powers Safari) is only for application-specific data, not for code, so presumably this still won’t allow web apps to run without internet connectivity.
Nonetheless, I’m sure Ryan is right to speculate that Apple is brewing up a complete RIA platform. It will be interesting to see whether they create their own markup language for creating rich user interfaces (powered by QuickTime?), analogous to Flex and XUL, or whether they stick to the HTML5 spec. I’d also like to know when these new features will make their way into Mobile Safari for use on the iPhone. It’s worth noting that the latest 1.1.3 firmware lets you create desktop (well, Springboard) shortcuts, so the addition of offline storage (for code as well as data) will finally make their vaunted web platform viable as a proper iPhone SDK.
Update: A commenter points out that CSS transforms and animations are not part of HTML5. The same appears to be true of downloadable fonts. Needless to say, I put in these errors intentionally from time to time to check if people are paying attention.
10 Responses to “Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability”
CSS tranforms/animations aren’t HTML5 features
By s on Feb 8, 2008
It’s worth noting that you can now use OpenLaszlo (the “original” Flex, now open source and widely adopted) without Flash. It can compile its RIA markup into browser-native JavaScript (as well as Flash), and the result looks identical in both cases, with full interactivity and animation. The performance of OpenLaszlo applications in the recent WebKit nightly builds is simply great — this browser outpaces Flash in execution speed as well as in rendering and animation speed. OpenLaszlo also takes advantage of non-standard HTML features implemented in WebKit such as vector drawing (via the canvas tag) and object rotation.
Next up: off-line, desktop shortcuts, media…
See http://www.openlaszlo.org/ for more info & demos.
David Temkin
Founder & CTO, Laszlo Systems
By DAvid temkin on Feb 8, 2008
What’s RIA?
By kayners on Feb 8, 2008
Rich Internet Application
By Matt on Feb 8, 2008
Please don’t publish articles with acronyms that you don’t explain. Maybe HTML is okay but I’m very tech-savvy, and I had to look up “RIA”.
By Steve on Feb 8, 2008
Sorry about that, I assumed most people who read this blog would be familiar with the term. I’ll have to post a glossary or something.
By Matt on Feb 8, 2008
Downloadable fonts are part of the CSS 2 specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html. The ability to run web applications offline is also being specified as part of HTML 5, though that portion of the specification is still under discussion: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#offline.
By Mark Rowe on Feb 8, 2008
What is RIA ?
By Dennis on Feb 10, 2008