HTML5 followup

Just wanted to follow up on my last post – Mads Kristensen is on Hanselminutes #251 talking about HTML5. Check it out :-)

Regards K.

HTML5 - what is it and what’s in it for me?

The wif'e’s out and the kids are asleep, nothing interesting is on the TV so I started googling for “HTML5 explained” and such. I’m interested in the subject because I feel obliged to stay tuned on the new stuff coming at us and I’ve wanted to dig a few feet deep into the matter when I had the time. What I found was simply so interesting that I wanted to share it with you because it’s a whole new world, baby…

“HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web is a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, together with many syntax errors in existing web documents”. Wikipedia tells us that HTML5 is trying to solve the problems we have today with an outdated HTML 4.01 specification where we rely heavily on Javascript, AJAX and a bunch of various industry standards such as JQuery to animate, play videos, validate data and so on.Take a look at the available types of input in HTML 4.01 and the input types available in HTML5. Geo-location is also a first-class citizen in HTML5 which enables any HTML5-capable browser to i.e. load a Google Map and mark your location on a map by using a few algorithms and whatever wireless network Google is able to locate you by.

By looking into the matter I found quite a few blogposts by people being concerned that the term “HTML5” is more of a marketing phrase than a distinct set of related technologies. Jeffrey Zelmand (who first coined the term “Web 2.0”, I think it was) has an interesting blogpost on the subject. He advocates for us to market HTML5 as “HTML5 and related technologies” or “HTML5 and other new technologies”. The reason is that HTML5 is still so vague that people don’t understand it (I don’t either – don’t shoot me, I’m just the pianoplayer) – which leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding core concepts and discussions running in circles. I like the “HTML5 and related technologies” since the HTML5 specification is concerning a lot on core HTML concepts (parsing) and less on everything else. There’s nothing about CSS in the spec for instance – that’s another story told by another spec.

How will the spec end up looking like? It is still under active development and every release has a profound disclaimer telling the world that they should expect the current APIs and elements to be subjects of change in the coming years until the standard have settled and stabilized itself. I found a fascinating post about the development of the first HTML standard and how it became to what we work with (and sometimes curse upon every day).  Get this: “But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins”  I don’t expect things to have changed much since then (sarcasm intended) so we will probably see some of the big players on the market implementing things their way and once their solution reaches critical mass – that’s how things make it into standardized glory.

What can you do as a developer to prepare yourself for the inevitable? You don’t have to worry for the next few years but time will come when you will need to take a deep breath and unlearn your current way of doing things when developing for the web. The reason is that once you start to use HTML5 there’s probably some element which solves a given problem for you. Don’t format your dates and times using Javascript anymore – use the appropriate input-element instead. Don’t use the ol’ A HREF for links – use the input type “url” instead. Order a new copy of “Who moved my cheese”, unlearn what you know and move on. The time is right when the HTML5 spec settles a bit.

Become a Javascript jedi is another safe bet and you should start today. HTML5 (or HTML 4.01 for that matter) won’t do you much good if you don’t know your way around a scripting language for the web. The applications you run today locally on your  machine is likely to move much closer to the web. Microsoft Office has a released a limited set of Office features in Office Web Apps for Sharepoint 2010 which enables users to open, edit and save Office-documents in a web browser without the user ever having installed Office locally on their machines. Things are moving towards webbased solutions and I wouldn’t be surprised if Office Webapps will have more features in 10 years from now than an Office installation on your local harddrive. Who says anyway that you need much more than a browser and an uplink to your desktop running in the cloud in 7-10 years from now? Which technologies are likely to be used when we get to that point? Spot on – HTML5 with Javascript (or something similar scripting engine) as the glue between data and user interactions.

Feel free to comment on your thoughts on HTML5 – I’d love some feedback on my thoughts in this matter.

Sharepoint 2010 - List item on custom content type not updated using Edit dialogue

Sharepoint 2010 can be a tricky bastard sometimes… One of the small, annoying things I’ve discovered being married to Sharepoint 2010 is that yesterday when I added two new columns in Schema.xml to an existing custom document contenttype I couldn’t update these two columns in the List Item Edit dialogue. The other columns in my content type (metadata fields) worked fine but my new Expiration date and a checkbox column wouldn’t change it’s values. Nothing showed up in the log-files – what the hey??  I wasn’t really surprised though. Behaviour like this isn’t uncommon during Sharepoint development so I googled the problem and found out that I had to alter the column name and everything would work out fine… Which it to my pleasant surprise did.

To make things work I ended up changing the StaticName Property on my Field in Schema.xml, hit deploy and things have went smooth from here. I’m writing this to spread the word since I had a bit of trouble finding a solution to my problem. Spread the word  :o)

Visual Studio likes to break my lines

I have always been irritated by Visual Studio for having automatically breaking lines whenever I completed a statement. For some reason I have lived with this for eons but suddenly today it got to me and I (mentally, for the sake of my co-workers) cried “DAMN YOU!!!” and started searching the Tools –> Options menu. After a mere two minutes I found this:

I could probably have spared quite a few hours of my life re-assembling lines of code being torn to pieces by Visual Studio after completing a line of code – lesson learned, don’t grow accostumed to irritation in your development environment for long periods of time because the solution could be no more than two minutes away

Norwegian Developer Conference – Day 2

I’m impressed… I’ve attended two different .NET debugging sessions today with Ingo Rammer. I kid you not – he is coding faster than Ayende himself. I don’t know the average amount of characters he was able to punch during a given timeframe but it was probably twice my own and I’m not exactly a slow writer. It was impressive – just like his sessions of debugging. I’ve got to know a load of features I had no idea existed in both Visual Studio and WinDbg. How do you debug a Windows Service which fails during startup? I know now… It includes using the geekiest tools available to you from Microsoft but it CAN be done.

I also attended two sessions with Jon Skeet. Today he shared with us his thoughts and wishes for C# 5 and how he would like the language to evolve. I can’t say I agree on much of it but he had some good thoughts about reducing boilerplate code when creating new instances of objects in various situations. But having polymorphic method overload in interfaces? I think not…

I’ve been a fan of DDD for quite some time (not ever succeeding with it on a project but even though you suck at football you can still be a fan, right?). I went to see Eric Evans about a talk reflecting upon his experiences and learnings after he wrote his much famous DDD book. Not the best performance but it was interesting to hear about i.e. domain events and their importance for a successful DDD experience if you take them into account and use them wisely. And I know a lot more about the .NET Service Bus and how it is the most important invention since Windows NT back in 1993. Don’t take my word for it – I believe Judal Lowy’s word weights a lot more than mine. He believes in it too so you should definately go for him instead of me  :o)

I’m off again – there’s a geek party planned about 9pm which is some 20 minutes from now. We’re leaving tomorrow so this is probably the last post for this week. I’ll recap the conference in a few days – see you then  :o)

Norwegian Developer Conference – Day 1

I’m attending the NDC 2010 and wow… The fatigue is settling by now after a nice dinner at a pizza-shop. I dare you: Have either of you ever paid 180 Norwegian Kroner ~ 28 US Dollars for a pizza without beverages? I knew that Norway was bloody expensive but I honestly didn’t see that one coming.

I attended seven sessions today Wednesday including the keynote kicking off the conference. I think I gave three or four green cards and two yellows… No red cards yet.   Sadly the two F# sessions this morning were cancelled so I watched Kevlin Henney at first talking about architecture and then Steve Strong walking us through the new features in .NET 4 System.Treading namespace. Quite interesting – I have a feeling that the usage of System.Threading is limited considering the day-to-day problems we face back at work but it’s good to know about the new stuff Microsoft has made available to us.

After that it was time for probably the best session for me today which was Scott Allen doing a talk about Modern Javascript. I know so little about the strengths and possibilities in Javascript so it was packed with information about features and core concepts that I had no clue existed. As a C# programmer hearing things like “functions as constructors” and “replacing the ‘this’ keyword with another object" rocked the boat quite a bit… I have decided to get to know Javascript better because my ignorance towards dynamic languages comes part from ignorance and part from the fear of the unknown, I guess. The only lasting solution to that problem is to take a deep dive into it and I was impressed even though I have to spend some time getting familiar with the concepts.

The session by Jon Skeet about Noda was interesting. I don’t think I share his passion for dates and times and I’ll probably sleep like a baby tonight despite that… I for one don’t really get a kick out  of a bug found in the New Zealand way of handling timezone restrictions but he managed to convince me that programming dates and times into an application is just as complicated as anything else which is the feeling I’ve had earlier. Earlier I almost felt a bit ashamed to not be able to figure out “simple” things with dates and times but the thing is: Dates and times in software development is hard, period. Jon says so, I’ve felt it on my own body – talk to the hand!

Until tomorrow…

Norwegian Developer Conference 2010

I’m currently sitting in my hotelroom watching Brazil scoring an insane 1-0 goal against North Korea – I’ve spent the last 15 minutes planning the day tomorrow where I’ll be attending NDC 2010. I’ve never been to the conference before but a collegue of mine were here last year and I was a little envious when I learned the speakers attending the conference last year… This year it seems to be more focused on upcoming Microsoft-related technologies such as Windows Azure, F# and a bunch of C# stuff but there’s also plenty of room for i.e. MonoRails and lots of other stuff built outside of Seattle.

I have decided to plan a bit ahead. The other conferences I’ve attended earlier I wen to without much planning ahead and afterwards I had a sensation that I should have been elsewhere instead of attending sessions which I ought to have known couldn’t teach me very much. What’s the idea of attending a TDD 1-1 session when you’ve reached past that stage years ago? So tomorrow I’ll be switching tracks a bit. One of the worst things about such a conference is all the stuff you DON’T get to see live… There are podcasts and webcasts afterwards but it doesn’t beat the sensation of being there yourself of course. I’ll be following two sessions of F#, delving into Javascript with Scott Allen and I’m looking forward to seeing Jon Skeet presenting a ported version of a Java DateTime framework… I decided to go to his session for three reasons: Jon Skeet is there, I never questioned the System.DateTime namespace in .NET and Jon Skeet is there… I haven’t got the faintest clue how another framework could attack issues regarding date-time stuff so it’ll probably be either an eyeopener or time wasted I guess.

…and now Brazil is leading 2 against 0… I’ll bet that if North Korea against all odds gets away with one or even three points the national TV-station will broadcast the North Korean goals in a loop 24-7 the next five years or so   :o)