Microsoft joins in to shape HTML 5

The unanswered question: how committed is Redmond to full and fast implemenation?

By John Cox on Wed, 08/12/09 - 5:45pm.

[via Ajaxian.com] CNET's Stephen Shankland picked up on Microsoft's public participation in the W3C HTML working group, having long left the next-generation HTML 5 standard to its Internet rivals.

Shankland's story focused on a lengthy 7 August email by Microsoft's Adrian Bateman to the working group's mailing list. Bateman is the UK-based program manager for Internet Explorer. His email offered the first feedback from "the IE team" on the current editor's draft of the HTML 5 standard.

"I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly," Bateman wrote. "At this stage we have more questions than answers but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."

Elements of HTML 5 are already being implemented in some desktop browser makers, and perhaps most aggressively in mobile Web browsers, where it promises to transform development of mobile Web applications.

Google, for example, has already been making use of two key HTML 5 APIs: Database and Application Cache (or "AppCache"). Both were used in the newest mobile version of Gmail: Database lets a mobile browser locally store Gmail messages in a local MySQL database; AppCache lets it locally store the Gmail functions and user interface in JavaScript and CSS files.

Other HTML 5 APIs include Canvas, for 2D bitmap graphics, Audio and Video, for in-browser multimedia playback, and Web sockets, which is just now starting to garner more widespread attention.

Web sockets creates a two-way, full-duplex communications link between the browser and anyi TCP-based backend application, data, or service. Kaazing Corp. has created what seems to be the first commercial implementation of Web sockets, the Kaazing Enterprise Gateway to support such a link. Kaazing has an explainer on line.

It remains to be seen how aggressively Microsoft will not only support the standards work but actually implement in the IE codebase and especially in the forthcoming Internet Explorer Mobile 6, which will make its appearance later this year with a new crop of smartphones using the latest version of Windows Mobile, now dubbed Windows Phone.