IE10 preview: A Preliminary Study on HTML5 translation from Sencha

 

IE10Preview: HTML5Preliminary Exploration

In the past few years, we have conducted a series of tests to evaluate the support of major mobile platforms for HTML5 applications. Till now, we still haven't spent time on Windows phones, mainly because Windows Phone7 browser is too weak to be evaluated. However, at last week's Windows Build meeting, we got a Developer Preview tablet running Windows 8 and IE10 ). We would like to share our first impression on HTML5 user experience. To put it simply (and with the caveat that we were running on the notably overpowered developer preview hardware), the HTML5 user experience of IE10 is the best on all of our platforms. After ten years of weakness in the Web field, Microsoft returned with revenge.

 

Windows 8 WebPlatform

Before entering the HTML5 support details in Win8 and IE10, it is worth reviewing some of the Windows 8 overview. Windows 8 represents a major change in Microsoft's policy because it makes Web technology the preferred choice for Windows native applications. Applications developed using Javascript, HTML, and CSS can be built as Windows native applications.

For Windows graphics, I/O, and device core service access, JavaScript is bound to. NET and C ++. Microsoft's message is that you can use web technology to build all Windows native applications.

So what are the differences between developing a simple web-based application running on IE10 and developing a native application distributed to Win8? The first difference is the resource you are allowed to access and how to access them. As a web-based application, you cannot access the protection resources of the system, such as cameras and printers. To package your web application into a native application, you must create a license list file to describe the protected resources you want to access, and then submit your application to the Windows app store. After a price increase, it will be subject to a series of technical and policy checks. Although it is not completely determined, we guess the App Store testing will be a web Technology Evaluation Department of Microsoft on the Windows platform.

 

HTML5Supported

What are the new features of IE10? Too many. The obvious parts include UI elements and special effects. IE10 preview supports the introduction of visual HTML5 and CSS3 features in almost all the past three years. In IE9, Microsoft has paid attention to several improvements to its capabilities, such as hardware acceleration and canvas. However, IE10 has introduced more:

N CSS Transformation: efficient and smooth conversion between 2D and 3D. 3D conversion and anti-aliasing are significantly better than many other browsers. The smoothness of the switch is impressive. Maybe it is the reason for hardware acceleration.

N CSS Animation: fully supports WebKit syntax, which makes us very mobile, because it means that the Sencha Animator animation runs easily on IE10, simply replace webkit with ms.

N CSS3 shadow: supports both text and box (including inserting object shadows ). Merging shadow effects and other effects will be flawless

N CSS3 skew: fully supports the new webki/mozilla syntax, allowing circular and elliptical radiation skew

N is just the beginning. There are also web workers, web sockets, web fonts, Indexed DB, SVG filters, and flexbox la S. It seems that only the image border is not implemented.

 

Microsoft has won several first

Among these released UI features, IE10 has created some features that have not been implemented in other browsers, such as CSS Regions and positioned floats. CSS Regions is a draft made by Adobe. It can make newspaper style la s to implement images similar to irregular insertion, cross-column, and floating text around. These are useful for publishing copies on the web. (Finally, Microsoft also promoted grid layout, although this is its exclusive implementation ......)

IE10 also provides some extensions for touch interfaces to control the scrolling, moving, and scaling of elements. For example, the-ms-content-zooming CSS attribute can control the Scalable elements and the-ms-scroll CSS attribute can scroll. These seem not standard behaviors, so it is also good to see that Microsoft drafts and covers these new features.

 

IE10Missing?

Several HTML5 technologies have not appeared in IE10. Considering Microsoft's platform policy, they may not appear in IE10 any more. WebGL is obviously not in the menu. 3D images: web developers intelligently use JavaScript to bind Windows Direct graphics to APIs and can only publish their applications as Windows applications. The corresponding media image and device APIs will never appear. These are the APIs that Microsoft wants you to destroy through Native binding.

 

And What Will Ship?

We think Win8 and IE10 are very mobile. We think it integrates HTML5 as a standard cross-platform application development technology. We hope that we no longer have to use native packages to access interesting device APIs, but Microsoft does not (policy considerations ). The final, but major, caveat is whether all these technologies will retain their speed and performance when Windows 8 is squeezed onto next year's $299 tablets which are likely to have a GigaByte of memory and a lower-powered ARM processor.

 

Of course we want this.