SANTA CLARA, California — The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.
“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, taking place here this week.
HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.
“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.
HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process data, which has led to the creation of more complex and rich web applications that run in the browser like Gmail, Facebook and apps that allow real-time data sharing, like Google Wave.
“Yes, this is a markup language for web pages,” he says, “but the really big shift that’s happening here — and, you could argue, what’s actually driving the fancy features — is the shift to the web becoming a client-side computing platform.”
The HTML5 specification is close to completion. The most recent releases of browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support most of the technologies being rolled in to HTML5. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer supports fewer of HTML5′s advancements, but it’s catching up. HTML5 is expected to become an official recommendation by late 2010 or 2011.
Now that the web has been elevated to a more powerful computing platform by HTML5, Berners-Lee says it has also given rise to complicated security issues.
“You got a piece of code from site A, and you’re person B running a browser you got from company C, and that code wants to access data stored with company E for the purposes of printing it on a printer owned by company D — How do you build that so that it’s not susceptible to all kinds of nasty attacks?”
“The technology is very exciting, but there’s actually a lot of work to do in these corridors to make it work on the real web in a secure way.”
User input is critical to the success of any project, be it a piece of desktop software, a web-based app or a simple brochure-ware website. And I’m not just talking about usability testing, e-mail forms or demographic surveys, which most of us consider a necessary evil. The truth is that your project, and your creative skills, can gain significantly from involving the user in the process of building and improving your app.
Granted, user communities can be a burden to manage, but the happiness of that very community determines how its members are going to engage with your app. If you ignore them or cheese them off, they’ll leave and refuse to come back. If you do what you can to satisfy them even a little, they’ll not only stick around, but they’ll encourage their friends to participate as well. And once you do engage your users directly, you’ll probably end up stunned at how rewarding the results can be.
The video above is of a talk by Google’s Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick — who is also head of Google’s Data Liberation Front, and who we interviewed last week on Webmonkey — at the company’s I/O developer conference last May. Ben and Brian talk in-depth about the “lost art of customer service” and the complicated relationship between engineers, user communities and marketing priorities.
A must watch for engineers, designers and project managers alike. About an hour long.
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has set out to rewire the e-mail inbox with a new product called Wave.
Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication and collaboration, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character-by-character.
Google Wave, which was demonstrated Thursday at the Google I/O developer conference taking place here, is now live as a private developer preview. Conference attendees can start playing with it now, and Google has its eye on a public beta launch within a few months.
It’s a peculiar model we haven’t seen before, sort of a “chat inside e-mail” approach that has the potential to profoundly alter the way we share information and collaborate with one another.
There are few effective ways to communicate within small groups, whether co-workers, friends, or family. Most of us use e-mail, just addressing a new message to a bunch of people. This starts a thread, which eventually gets twisted and fragmented into side conversations and becomes more and more confusing. The more-organized among us use tools like IM or IRC chat rooms, wikis, group blogs or web apps built for threaded communications, such as FriendFeed.
Google Wave is an attempt to replace not one but all of these methods, rolling threaded conversations, real-time chat, nested comments, media sharing, link sharing and wiki-style collaboration into a familiar interface that looks and behaves like an e-mail inbox, complete with folders for keeping things organized and a search box for digging up older threads.
Here’s how it works. First, a screenshot:
A user starts a “wave,” a new thread in the system. At first, it looks just like an e-mail. A wave usually starts as text, but photos can be dragged in, and videos or maps can be embedded. The user invites friends by dragging and dropping names from a list of contacts in a sidebar. New users can start leaving comments in line, setting a break point in the original text and adding a comment directly below the paragraph, photo or whatever piece of the wave they want to comment on. There’s even a built in spell-checker that’s context-sensitive.
As the new user is leaving a comment, everyone involved in the wave can see the comments being typed in, in real time, letter by letter. Edits can be made concurrently, so two or more users can see one anothers’ changes flowing in, even as they’re leaving their comments, making edits or uploading images.
And it really is instantaneous: Google is measuring Wave’s latency in the low milliseconds.
The methods of communicating we’ve grown used to in the last decade, primarily e-mail and instant messaging, are being usurped by more intuitive and time-sensitive alternatives on the social web. Thanks to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, the emphasis now is on real-time communication: Updates are expected instantly, and we leave many of our conversations open for comments. There’s an initial flurry of activity, a constant stream of back-and-forth chatter between participants. Conversations morph and evolve quickly, then, hours or days later, eventually sputter out and fade.
This is the model Wave is clearly embracing. But Google didn’t initially set out to build a better Twitter or a better FriendFeed.
“In a sense, we’ve taken a cue from almost every communication tool that’s ever existed,” Google senior software engineer Jens Rasmussen, one of the leads on the Wave team, tells Webmonkey. And since Wave has been in development for more than two-and-a-half years, he says it has evolved alongside the social, real-time web we’re living in today, taking new cues along the way.
Even though the emphasis is on real time, the structure that’s left behind after the fact is just as important, Rasmussen says. Users can create persistent searches on any phrase or topic. Also, new participants can “play back” the wave to see how the conversation developed over time, from the original message onwards.
It’s also important to note Wave is very much a web app, built entirely in JavaScript and with several HTML 5 elements for modern browsers which support the nascent spec.
Images can be dragged and dropped into the app in the browser if Gears is installed. All of the uploading happens in the background, thanks to the web-workers component of HTML 5. Wave also has an API, so people can put waves on their web pages. The whole interface of the wave gets embedded in the page, but it can be styled to match the blog or external site. Replies, questions and edits all appear in real time.
There’s a new protocol at work behind the scenes here, and Google is making it available under an open source license. Both the client and the server code will be released, so third-party apps can be built on the desktop or for the browser, and companies or groups can run their own private instances. However, because Wave is built using a federated protocol, different instances will be able to communicate with one another seamlessly across the single platform.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — This morning was HTML 5′s big coming-out party.
At Google I/O, the company’s developer conference taking place at the Moscone Center here this week, Google Vice President of engineering Vic Gundotra centered the majority of his keynote presentation around what the company is doing to promote the next version of HTML, the mark-up language upon which the bulk of the web is built.
HTML 5 is still nascent technology. It’s only in the draft specification stage, mired in committee at the W3C, the web’s governing body. But HTML 5 is already being implemented in the wild, both as experimental demos and as the driving technology behind the latest wave of web applications.
“HTML 5 offers us a chance to do things differently,” says Gundotra. He also noted that in the last decade, we’ve seen close to a 100X improvement in JavaScript parsing across the major browsers that helps make the latest apps run faster.
To illustrate his point, Gundotra showed several breakthrough HTML 5 demos during his keynote. You can view all of the demos here.
We saw a video playing in a mocked-up version of a YouTube page without using Flash. All of the video playback was handled using the HTML 5 video tag.
“The problem with video right now is that there’s too much outside of your control,” Gundotra says. “HTML 5 gives you a <video> tag that’s as simple to use as the <image> tag.”
We also saw a motion-tracking video app rendered in JavaScript, complete with full-motion HTML video playback. A woman walked across the camera’s field of view while a JavaScript app, running in the browser, tracked her movement and dynamically drew bounding boxes around the different parts of her body as she paced back and forth. Normally, this intense of an app would cause the browser to lock up and crash (or throw a spinning beach ball). But thanks to HTML 5′s “web workers” background processing capabilities, the browser barely stuttered while the app was running. The crowd of 4,000 attendees applauded wildly at this.
We saw a Doom-style first-person shooter game rendered entirely using JavaScript and HTML 5′s canvas vector graphics engine. Gundotra also showed off a canvas-powered analytics tool with 2D graphs you can zoom in on and resize on the fly, and a 3D animated demo of a beach scene, complete with crashing waves, flickering torches and palm trees blowing in the breeze, all rendered in JavaScript and HTML 5.
Gundotra’s demos concentrated on the “five components of HTML 5 Google is most excited about”: canvas, video, web workers, geolocation, app cache and database access.
The latest versions of the mobile Android browser and the soon-to-be-released Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone will both support some HTML 5 elements, so of course there were some mobile demos at the I/O keynote, as well. The team showed a Gmail user checking his e-mail in the browser while disconnected from the internet (utilizing HTML 5′s support for offline data access) and an iPhone user updating his location in Google Latitude running in the browser (the new iPhone software, due in June, supports geolocation via HTML 5).
It’s exciting to see Google betting the bank on HTML 5, but not entirely surprising. The company is in the web app business, so any technology that makes web apps faster, better and more useful is going to be supported — even more so if that technology is based on open standards and doesn’t require plug-ins or proprietary code like Flash and Silverlight.
Wednesday’s keynote wasn’t all cheerleading. Several digs were aimed at Microsoft for failing to support much of HTML 5 in the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE8 does have experimental geolocation support, but no support for HTML 5 video playback, canvas, or web workers.
Microsoft is quick to argue that it isn’t prudent to build support for untested technologies into its browser code, which is used by the majority of people on the web. Probably closer to the truth: Microsoft has its own playback technology in Silverlight and isn’t interested in sinking its own ship.
Microsoft has pledged support for HTML 5, but warns that it’s still a long way off. But as Gundotra’s keynote illustrates, HTML 5 is just about all grown up, and everyone else is choosing to innovate and put the latest capabilities through the paces right now.
After Wednesday’s coming-out party, maybe Microsoft will change its tune.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — Website owners now have the ability to plug the most popular Google products directly into their web pages with the ease of adding a YouTube video.
The company has launched Google Web Elements, a collection of widgets site publishers can embed on their pages to display customized content from several of Google’s key web services.
If you go to the new Google Web Elements site, you’ll see options to embed custom widgets for Calendars, Maps, Google News, YouTube Video News, Presentations, Spreadsheets and Google Conversations, something new we’ll get to in a moment.
The new service was announced at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference taking place at the Moscone Center here this week.
Google has offered similar tools for site builders in the past, but they’re only useful to those comfortable working with XHTML code, developer keys and FTP clients. With the launch of Web Elements, it’s obvious the company is trying to de-mystify the entire process and pull in the less-advanced users. Generating and embedding a widget is straightforward and dead easy — if you can embed a YouTube video, you possess the required smarts to embed a Google Web Element.
In fact, according to Web Elements technical lead DeWitt Clinton, the YouTube model served as inspiration for these new widgets.
“We were looking at how easy it is to embed a YouTube video and we thought, ‘Couldn’t we do this with news, maps and search,’” Clinton says.
Each of the different Elements has its own customization options. Any public calendar or event can be displayed in the Calendar Element. For the Maps element, the publisher just plugs in an address and gets a custom map. For custom search, the basic Google search tool can be scoped to one site, a handful of sites or the entire web.
The News Element can display the top stories of the day, or it can be narrowed down to specific topics. For example, if you’re running an Apple news site, you can generate a persistent search for “Steve Jobs” that displays the latest news headlines about Steve, just like the personalized view options on Google News.
The YouTube Video News element has fewer customization options. For now, it just plays a series of breaking news clips, and the playlist is populated by whatever clips the feed providers — The New York Times and the Associated Press, among others — and dumping into the YouTube News channel.
Each element appears in its own box (an HTML inline frame) which can be resized to whatever works best with the site’s design. Publishers just dress up the widget however they’d like, grab the i-frame code and add it to their site.
The most unique is the Conversations Element, which allows for embed commentary around any particular topic. To use the hypothetical Apple blog example again, you could ask your visitors what they hope to see in the next iPhone. Anyone who wants to participate in the discussion can log in and leave a comment.
User authentication is handled by Google’s Friend Connect single sign-on technology, so participants can log in using either a Google account or any OpenID, such as a MySpace, AOL or Yahoo login. This opens up participation to just about everyone on the web, not just Google users.
Furthermore, you can choose to keep the discussion limited to just your own site, or you can allow the Element to be embedded anywhere on the web. If you choose to make it public, a small “embed this” link appears at the bottom of the Element, so anyone can grab the widget and place it on their site. As it propagates across other sites, all comments and conversations related to that topic will appear in all instances of the widget, including yours.
It’s important to note that Web Elements are different from Gadgets, those little weather and news widgets that you can embed on your iGoogle start page. Clinton says that while Gadgets are an open container format that lets anyone build whatever they want, Web Elements will always be controlled by Google and they’ll only contain Google products.
The company will incorporate more Google services and add more features to the existing Elements in the coming months, he says.
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