Awesome HTML5

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This week is all about HTML5. We had staff from Microsoft  and senior student of CS3216 demonstrating us HTML5. I was deeply impressed by what HTML5 can do.

After attending lecture and workshop, and Googling, I have thoughts; please correct me if I am wrong.

  • This is the newest generation of HTML, the basic internet content. HTML5 is still under development, but major browsers such as Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox, have partial supports and are continuing adding more features into their new versions.
  • Different browsers have different ways to interpreting the contents. Take the tag as an example: in Safari, videos can be played in fullscreen mode, but there is no such option in Chrome. (I just test this in Safari and Chrome, I am not sure about other browsers.)
  • There are two ways to storing off-line data: localStorage, where data will be stored permanently, and sessionStorage, where data is deleted when user closes the browser window. This is good way to providing off-line-playing feature. However, I have some concerns about it. “This data is stored permanently until user clear the cookies”, which is annoying to me, because my hard disk is not big; even if it is, I don’t want it stores “trashes”. Can a feature like “self-destroying”, after not loading some time the localStorage is automatically deleted,  be added? What kind of data is stored? Will there be security leaks? Will users be alerted before applications store data on user’s computer?
  • HTML5 applications relay on Javascript, which can be overwritten on client’s side. Maybe some users can just hack the applications easily, like they can modify their tokens of a game.
  • I played some games from , some of them are really good.

IVLE has released it API recently, which gives developers access to webcast. It will be nice to have an Ipad IVLE app plays webcast. If an app can get lecture notes from IVLE, take annotations and sync the notes to clouding (like Dropbox), it will be really awesome! Maybe one simple thing I can do is to sync schedule to Google calendar, or Ical.