When talking about the development of HTML5 mobile Web applications, many developers are willing to use them only after they have a bright future. Indeed, HTML5 mobile Web applications have the potential to change the entire mobile application ecosystem, but at least now, local applications are the channel that developers believe. Some decisive and successful HTML5 mobile web applications are required to include others in this ecosystem.
A company that has developed a successful mobile Web application is the social conference directory (lanyrd. Now, lanyrd is releasing the mobile Web version of their app with the HTML5 offline browsing feature, allowing you to view the party information when the network is busy. For HTML5 developers, let's take a look at how lanyrd uses HTML5 features for innovation, and we may see the prospects for success.
For lanyrd, HTML5's offline browsing capability is critical. Have you ever experienced such a scenario? In a conference, you couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi signal, and a large group of people crowded in the signal station to obtain mobile phone signals? This is too common. In this case, it is impossible to use the formal meeting application (or even the lanyrd itself.
For example, in last October, when I traveled to London to attend the Nokia World Conference, my mobile phone could not connect to the Internet. Because I am abroad, it is impossible to pay for mobile data. In the Nokia World Conference, Wi-Fi connections were so bad that I had to wander between the venues at each layer and explore what was going on. At this time, it would be nice to have an application that supports offline browsing.
The offline cache of lanyrd can be used on any platforms and mobile browsers that support it. This means that most devices, such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and machines that rely on opera Mini as Web browsers (such as older versions of Symbian machines) can be used.
Jack Archibald, Chief Engineer of lanyrd in charge of the product, talked in an email to readwritemobile about what is needed to create the new HTML5 application.
"We use the HTML5 application cache for offline site browsing. Users can view all information about the meetings they attended, even if they are not connected to the Internet. As a person who often participates in meetings, offline browsing is very important. Whenever I use a network abroad, I can almost see a mess of network conditions ."
"The offline browsing feature is not designed for data-driven websites, So we became one of the first (data-driven) sites to provide offline browsing support. We are happy to talk about some of the technologies we use when developing this application ."
"All our images are in double resolution, so everything on high-resolution devices is very clear. Without a high-resolution device, mobile Web applications look terrible. We also shared the mustache template between the server and the device, and used xhr +, an HTML5 API to update the page. This makes the user feel fast, because the browser does not have to reparse JavaScript on every page ."
"Although we have used some new and dazzling browser features, we have adopted a progressively enhanced design path to test as widely as possible to support more devices. Although most mobile products are for some special products or WebKit, our products support some special products such as the antique BlackBerry 9000 (which is still used by some people), Kindle, there are also some mobile phones with only basic performance, as long as they can run opera mini. This site does not have javascript as we expected. In fact, we have avoided the Javascript parsing overhead on the device, because it does not help much even with JavaScript ."
Lanyrd sets an example for innovative app HTML5 features to create a mobile web app with excellent features. In terms of offline cache, it is the second application that has a good offline cache application, and the first is Kindle cloud reader.
Lanyrd has great development space. It can provide the application to the Conference as a backbone service and help the organizer to combine Dynamic cross-platform applications. It can also provide this application to the Conference as a cooperative application. As long as there is enough creativity, lanyrd can build a business model around this HTML5 product.
Original article from: webapptrend