Creating apps for the Web has been a messy and complicated affair for years – because the Web was never designed for apps. Fundamentally, the Web was originally built to deliver documents, not interactive applications. Yet, since nearly the beginning, Web developers have tried to kludge together ways to make the medium more than just a passive document platform (remember CGI scripts?).
Web apps have since grown very sophisticated, but to do so they have required a toolbox that isn't really built into Web standards. From browser-specific features (like Internet Explorer) to third-party plug-ins (like Flash), today's Web apps are built on a mish-mash of technologies that represent a very fractured environment. To see the cost of this problem one need only look at how many enterprises still rely on Internet Explorer 6 – an old and outdated browser by any measure – just because their Intranet apps were coded to its specific capabilities and quirks.
Support for the new HTML5 standard is rapidly gaining ground in the newest versions of major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Now is the time to consider embracing HTML5. Let's consider some reasons why:
HTML5 introduces native features that enable building sophisticated Web apps using accepted standards. Your HTML5 apps will run in cross-platform and cross-browser environments, and be faster and cheaper to develop and maintain.
Using HTML5 form validation features, your developers can rely on standard code to ensure integrity of user-input data and improve security. Today, form input validation is typically run on the server. This means it may be coded in any one of a variety of languages, potentially adding complexity to maintaining your Web app. Further, this requires the server to do more work and produces a slower user experience as the browser must wait for the server to check user input.
HTML5 Web workers bring multi-threaded processing to browsers. Complex apps that need to perform many tasks at once will run much faster in HTML5-compatible browsers, which can divide tasks into smaller jobs that run in parallel, much as modern operating systems already do. The result, once again, is that your users' experience in the browser will be significantly improved, resulting in a Web app experience that is more like a native desktop app – with the benefits of being server-based and OS independent.
Offline storage in HTML5 means that applications can save data on the user's local hard drive. Until now, the only local data Web pages could save are cookies, which are limited to a small size. With HTML5, developers have access to a local SQL database. By storing data locally, applications can use the database as a cache, significantly reducing calls to the server. This will both accelerate the user experience and reduce server bandwidth, allowing your servers to handle more clients for less cost. Plus, well utilized offline storage could allow Web apps to function for at least temporary periods of time without an Internet connection, such as storing recent messages in a mail client.
HTML5 knows where you are. Or to put it another way, HTML5 brings geo-awareness to the browser, allowing the app developer to consider the user's geographic location (on clients that provide this data). Geo-location can be used in a variety of ways, such as providing users with resources based on their proximity, or triggering an order shipment from a warehouse nearest the client. And of course, geo-location can also be used to power a whole genre of apps specifically built around physical location, including navigation and mapping services.
For more information, see:
How to Get Employees to Use Collaboration Tools
Making Sense of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Tools
Why More Companies Are Exploring ‘Bring Your Own Tech’ Policies
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