iPad News & Tablet PC Reviews

Developers are gearing up for the next round of browsers that they have to develop web applications for.  A world without browser plug-ins is the world that Apple pictures, as their iPad browser doesn’t support even Flash, the most common plug-in on the web.

An early decision from Apple was that the iPad would only render videos and other multimedia found commonly on the internet in HTML5.  While this is typical for Apple to control their environment, never before have they been able to control the user’s browsing experience to this level before the iPad.

Now, from an iPad developer standpoint, this makes another browser to throw into the cross-compatibility mix.  The biggest hurdle is that HTML5 is not backwards compatible, so browsers like IE6 (which will not die), will never be able to display videos natively.

Compounding the issue is that even iPad designed sites that are HTML5 compliant won’t be able to use drag-and-drop.  You know, the old cornerstone of web 2.0?  Yeah, it seems that the iPad multi-touch doesn’t support drag and drop, so all that work that devs put into their websites will have to be ripped out.

The good news is that, if your site isn’t heavy on the flash, a conversion to the iPad ready website formats isn’t a giant hurdle.  The bad news is that, if you use flash, you have a lot of iPad development ahead of you…

But unlike Flash, HTML5 doesn’t yet have a lot of production-ready integrated developer environments. “Flash has very good authoring tools,” Lawson said. As McAllister noted, Dreamweaver and FlashBuilder are already incorporated into the day-to-day operations of many Web development shops.

In contrast, the tools for HTML5 and related technologies are still being developed. Worse yet, many are aimed more at the programmer than the run-of-the-mill Web designer. As one media company told the Valleywag industry gossip site, “Guess what, we don’t have a bunch of code junkies in our newsroom.” (Though Adobe itself seems to be in the early stages of incorporating the HTML5 standards into its own production tools, if this prototype of Dreamweaver that converts artwork into HTML5’s Canvas tag is any indication).

Another potential problem: The HTML5 standard has not actually been finalized yet.

Story by: Joab Jackson | Original Published Date: 4/5/2010
Original Title: The IPad Makes Demands on Web Developers
Source: CIO

Filed under: iPad Devs · Tags: adobe flash, iPad Designed, iPad Launch