It was another busy week for the HTML5 industry, with developments both positive and negative, so let’s dive right in!
Starting with some good news, Kendo UI released the results of its most recent Global Developer Survey — gauging the opinions of over 5,000 developers, CIOs and technology executives about HTML5 — and found that HTML5 adoption seems to be on the rise. The survey found that half of respondents have developed a variety of apps using HTML5, while 9 out of 10 expect to use the language in 2013. A mere 15 percent said they would stick to "native-only" development for the time being.
As for the bad news, an HTML5 exploit was discovered by Stanford graduate student Feross Aboukhadijeh that could allow sites written with the language to fill up users’ hard drive. This exploit is based around the HTML5 draft standard’s unclear rules regarding the local storage of data from a website.
While it is advised that HTML5 developers stick to about 5MB, or less depending on the browser, Aboukhadijeh found that most browsers count subdomains as different sites, allowing malicious coders to create an infinite amount. Aboukhadijeh’s proof-of-concept site, Filldisk.com, demonstrates this. The exploit works in Google (News
– Alert) Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer, but not Firefox.
In other news, Google recently began shifting aspects of its premium content offerings to its open source WebM video format delivered to an HTML5 player. In fact, Samsung Chromebook users now entirely use WebM rather than Flash on YouTube (News – Alert) and Google Play. Most impressively, Google focused on the security layer that enables the sending of encrypted videos to an HTML5 player.
PhotoBiz, a managed website solutions company that designs and hosts websites, blogs and e-commerce offerings, moved toward HTML5 in the form of HTML5 Portfolio Site designs. These replace FLASH+ designs recoded into HTML5, also including a number of new designs.
"Our HTML5 Portfolio Site collection has given our clients the easiest, most flexible, and customizable website solution to showcase their portfolio, on any device that can browse the internet. The same branding across all platforms is essential for any successful business and the PhotoBiz HTML5 Portfolio Site designs provide that," said PhotoBiz’s John Krazmien.
Lastly, ACCESS Co. said that it will demonstrate its latest multiscreen technologies at the TV Connect show, including how to create viable multiscreen business models based on HTML5 and DLNA technologies. Specifically, they will demonstrate combining HTML5’s ability to create advanced user interfaces and applications with the DLNA streaming standard. ACCESS will use the NetFront Browser NX, a Webkit-based HTML5 browser for demonstrations including sharing from a PVR to a mobile device.
That’s all for this week. Check out the HTML5 Report main page for more news in this space.