The State – Sort of – of HTML5 Audio

Scott Schiller discusses the high level of hype around HTML5 and CSS3. The two specs render ”many years of feature hacks redundant by replacing them with native features,” he writes in an insightful blog.

Blogging, he says:

CSS3’s border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and gradients, and HTML5’s <canvas>, <audio> and <video> are some of the most anticipated features we’ll see put to creative (ab)use as adoption of the ‘new shiny’ grows. Developers jumping on the cutting edge are using subsets of these features to little detriment, in most cases. The more popular CSS features are design flourishes that can degrade nicely, but the current audio and video implementations in particular suffer from a number of annoyances.

He begs the question: Are we going to see a common format across the major browsers for both audio and video?

Check it out!

IBM recently announced the open source contribution of Maqetta to the Dojo Foundation. Maqetta provides WYSIWYG authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag/drop assembly, and supports both desktop and mobile user interfaces.

Maqetta is said to target user experience designers working in teams focused on  HTML5 application development.

The Maqetta application runs in the browser. Features include: a visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces; drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an ”exact-dimension” device silhouette (e.g., the silhouette of an iPhone)
simultaneous editing in either design or source views ; and  a Web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mockup for review by team members.

Maqetta is intended to fill a major hole in the HTML5 ”ecosystem” around visual tooling. “Maqetta is a great complement to other initiatives at the Dojo Foundation, particularly our mobile initiatives such as dojox.mobile, Wink Toolkit, EmbedJS, and integration of these with PhoneGap” said Dylan Schiemann, President at the Dojo Foundation and CEO at SitePen, in a statement.

The Preview 1 release of the Maqetta application is available for the community to use for free at the open source project’s Web site, http://maqetta.org

It is high time developers take back HTML5 from the marketing people, says Chrisian Heilmann. “HTML5 is the evolution of our web technologies, not another flashy add-on to already badly used outdated practices,” he writes in a blog posting that includes illuminating slides.

http://www.wait-till-i.com/2011/02/09/using-html5-sensibly-and-multimedia-on-the-web-speaking-at-the-london-ajax-meetup/

Cross document messaging is addressed in a recent HTML5 Web Messaging Working draft from the redoubtable W3C. The proposed messaging system is said to “allow documents to communicate with each other regardless of their source domain, in a way designed to not enable cross-site scripting attacks.” For more on the w3C draft, go to its HTML5 Web Messaging page.