When I see comparisons of HTML5 to native apps I get the feeling that the way we measure failure and success could give statisticians a heart attack. Take Andrea Giammarchi’s The difficult road to vine via web as an example. In this piece Andrea, who really knows his stuff tries to re-create the hot app of the month, Vine using “HTML5 technologies” and comes to the conclusion – once again – that HTML5 is not ready to take on native technologies head-on. I agree. But I also want to point out that a 1:1 comparison is pretty much useless. Vine is only available in iOS. Vine also was purposely built to work for the iPhone. In order to prove if HTML5 is ready all we’d need to do is to find one single browser on one single OS, nay even only on one piece of hardware to match the functionality of Vine.

Instead we set the bar impossibly high for ourselves. Whenever we talk about HTML5 we praise its universality. We talk about build once and run everywhere and we make it impossible for ourselves to deliver on that promise if we don’t also embrace the flexible nature of HTML5 and the web. In other words: HTML5 can and does deliver much more than any native app already. It doesn’t limit you to one environment or hardware and you can deliver your app on an existing delivery platform – the web – that doesn’t lock you in to Terms and Conditions that could change any time from under you. Nowhere is written though that the app needs to work and look the same everywhere. This would actually limit its reach as many platforms just don’t allow HTML5 apps to reach deep into hardware or to even perform properly.

What needs to change is our stupid promise of HTML5 apps working the same everywhere and matching all the features of native apps. That can not happen as we can not deliver the same experience regardless of connectivity, hardware access or how busy the hardware is already. HTML5 apps, unless packaged, will always have to compete with other running processes on the hardware and thus need to be much cleverer in resourcing than native apps.

Instead of trying to copy what’s cool in native and boring and forgotten a month later (remember Path?) if we really want to have HTML5 as our platform of choice we should play it to its strengths. This means that our apps will not look and feel the same on every platform. It means that they use what the platform offers and allow lesser able environments to at least consume and add data. And if we want to show off what HTML5 can do, then maybe showcasing on iOS is the last thing we want to do. You don’t put a runner onto a track full of quicksand, stumbling blocks and a massive wind pushing in the opposite direction either, do you?

HTML5 needs to be allowed to convince people that it is a great opportunity because of its flexibility, not by being a pale carbon copy of native apps. This leads to companies considering native as the simpler choice to control everything and force users to download an app where it really is not needed. Tom Morris’ “No I’m not going to download your bullshit app” and the lesser sweary I’d like to use the web my way thank you very much, Quora by Scott Hanselman show that this is already becoming an anti-pattern.

Personally I think the ball is firmly in the court of Android to kill the outdated and limiting stock browser and get an evergreen Chrome out for all devices. I also look for Blackberry 10 to make a splash and for Windows phone and tablets to allow us HTML5 enthusiasts to kick arse. And then there is of course Firefox OS, but this goes without saying as the OS itself is written in HTML5.

I am not a big fan of the cold. I like spring weather with sensible temperatures. The last 3 days I spent in Kiruna, Sweden, which is very high up north indeed and right now running at around -20 degrees centigrade. That means that the inside of your nose freezes so that you think you always have a stray booger hanging from it and it also means that any water on your hair turns into icicles:

The trip was organised by some people in Spotify and cost me a few hundred pounds. What it gave me though was an amazing experience, seeing the Northern Lights, riding a snow mobile and – probably the most amazing bit – steering a dog sled over a frozen river, a frozen lake and through some woods. I also had to rough it as there was no space in the larger huts any more so our castle was the size of my bedroom in London, with no running water and the bathroom in an even smaller hut about 50 meters away. But that is by the by, let me tell you about the dog sledding.

We got out in the early morning wearing 3 trousers, 4 pair of socks and five layers of pullovers, longsleeves and jackets. I bought a down jacket for the trip but it turned out that in order to survive safely and not to have the smell of dog on you for the rest of the week, it is a good idea to rent another thick overall and snow boots, furry hats and two pair of gloves.

Feeling like the Michelin Man we drove to the dog kennel were we got introduced to our dogs and got the introduction how to steer a dog-sled.

Now, as a trainer and working in corporate environments for a long time I am used to explaining everything and getting every little detail explained to me to avoid people doing stupid things or suing me or my company. I thought that getting dragged through the woods by five dogs with a one track mind of running as fast as they can would warrant quite some introduction, too. But what we got was this:

These are your dogs, the first two are brothers, one of them is shy and the other is quite lively. They are nice though, you can pet them. Make sure to pet their sides so they feel safe or they may run towards the other dogs and get entangled with them. When the dogs get entangled, they might break a leg, be careful. Also when you stand the passenger should keep them on the leash to make sure they don’t go where you don’t want them to. These are the guiding dogs. The other three are the engines. The couple in the back is a female and a male, make sure the male one doesn’t go near other males as he will bite them and doesn’t stop until they are dead. He doesn’t like other males, but he likes females fine.

So much for the dogs – and these are sled dogs. They are nice enough but more wolf than domesticated wagging tail types. They bark and howl when they don’t run – a lot. As my partner put it, they are like arrows – they just want to go fast in one direction as soon as possible. The whole introduction to the sledge was this:

As the passenger, keep your feet on the inside of the skis or you might get stuck on a root and break your foot. Bend slightly with the curves to make the sledge go easier. For the driver: this is the brake, step on it to go slow and keep both feet on it when you want to stand in a place as the dogs might run off and you’ll fall off. This is the anchor, stomp it into the ground when you want to stand and the passenger should put the lead in the front on a pole or a tree. Keep the anchor safe as it might end up in your side, leg or the head of the passenger otherwise. Always keep both hands on the handle and steer with your weight. The dogs are nice, don’t worry. Just make sure not to run into the other sledges.

So there I was in the freezing cold with my glasses fogging over and being dragged by five semi-wild dogs who poop while they run and on every stop jump headfirst into the snow to eat it after giving you a “why did we stop, I want to run!” look. I was not in control, I was not really sure how this works or why.

But the longer it went and the more I saw the joy the dogs had when running the more I felt comfortable and secure in what I am doing and the dogs reacted to my steering and my breaking without a hitch. We switched on the way back and as a passenger you managed to see the snowy landscape from a totally new point of view.

I did it. When thinking back of all the things that could go wrong I am amazed about the nonchalance of the guides when it comes to getting us into this. But it works. They trusted us to find our way to cope and to get secure and more assured in what we are doing. And that made it extremely rewarding for me.

Now it is your turn. Don’t wait for the perfect introduction, don’t wait until you are considered an expert before opening your mouth or going out in public with your ideas. You don’t have to go into the cold and get dragged along by dogs. How about starting simpler and publish some of your thoughts or send out a proposal to speak at a conference? How about organising a talk in your company? How about learning a new skill you always considered yourself to be not having any talent in? Do it, do something “crazy”.

Opera today announced that they are ditching their own Presto rendering engine for Webkit and V8. More details as to what that means for developers are on the ODIN blog. The reasons are reasons you expect a commercial company to give:

To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

Two things led to this: Apple not allowing any other engine on iOS (which means that Opera for iOS, or ICE will be the same as Chrome on iOS – not really quite the other browser but a shell with the iOS engine under it) and developers building for webkit only and sites breaking in Opera. As Peter-Paul Koch put it:

Note carefully what this means: we web developers haven’t been doing our jobs properly. We didn’t bother to test our mobile sites on Opera Mini, even though it’s roughly as large as Safari iOS and Android.

I see this as a personal fail. I evidently haven’t been outspoken enough on the topic. I should have yelled in everybody’s ear until they did the proper thing.

It’s our own fault.

Content not showing up or showing up broken in your product is terrible for a commercial company – the web is never wrong, if your browser shows it wrongly it is your fault, right?

Wrong. I always called Opera the Douglas Crockford of browsers as it was ruthless in its implementation of standards. If something didn’t work in Opera there is a good chance that you did something wrong. Even better – fixing it in Opera in most cases meant looking at how the W3C standard meant things to work and write your code accordingly, which in most cases meant no change in other browsers, but cleaner code overall. Opera was my linting tool.

Big whoop, so what? Everybody uses Webkit, it is open source, and it is the best browser as everything just works, right? Again, I don’t feel good about this. As my colleague Robert O’Callahan put it:

Some people are wondering whether engine diversity really matters. “Webkit is open source so if everyone worked together on it and shipped it, would that be so bad?” Yes. Web standards would lose all significance and standards processes would be superceded by Webkit project decisions and politics. Webkit bugs would become the standard: there would be no way for developers to test on multiple engines to determine whether an unexpected behavior is a bug or intended.

Ex-Netscape employee and CSS working group chair Daniel Glazman agrees:

For the CSS Working Group, that’s an earthquake. One less testing environment, one less opportunity to discover bugs and issues.

Jake Archibald of the Chrome devrel team shares my views of Opera as a great testing platform, so much that when they were wrong, he just assumed it was his fault:

I develop in Chrome, then check stuff in Safari & Firefox. Usually, this would be painless, everything would be as expected (usually). Testing in IE and Opera was often less fun. But here’s the difference, things would be wrong in IE because of bugs, whereas things would be wrong in Opera because they were adhering to the spec (I’m generalising, of course). When Opera did the wrong thing with appcache FALLBACK entries I poured over the spec for a couple of hours on the assumption they were doing it right and the others were doing it wrong. Turns out Opera had a bug, but if any other browser was behaving so differently I’d have instantly assumed it was that browser getting it wrong.

As developers (well, let’s say as new developers to the web) we always complain about diversity in browsers and how hard it is to support them all. What we fail to remember there is that standards only work when they are tested and verified in many different environments. Otherwise, they aren’t standards and may just be happy accidents that are not necessarily repeatable. All browser engines have their good things and bad things and a good standard should define what is best in all of them and help implementing that across the browsers in use. As Jake found out, Presto was ahead of many others in terms of UI performance of JavaScript – a massive point in mobile:

Presto is full of surprises, and I’m only saying that half-sarcastically. In 2009 I was preparing a talk on JS performance and discovered that, in Opera, pages would continue to be responsive (scrolling, text selection) while JavaScript was stuck in a loop. No other browser did this, JavaScript blocks the UI thread.

I understand the motivation of Opera for this move, and I wish them all the luck they can have. Even more I wish that the engineering talent that comes to Webkit with this move will get a lot of power and be listened to. Opera was always a very loud voice advocating standards over what is easy and seems like a great idea at a certain time. It would be a shame if that voice gets drowned out by others using the same engine and having different ideas or a corporate agenda to follow. Standards aren’t dead, there is no “one Webkit” as much as there was no “one Internet Explorer”. I find it very disappointing that a company feels forced to make a move like that to stay commercially interesting.

Maybe I am a dreamer, but I always prefer choice over what is easy and promises me that everything just works. As, when you are honest, nothing ever just works and the only way to stay sane in this is to have a standard to compare to. We don’t only need “this works”, we also need “why does this work, and how can we ensure it is ready for changes that are coming up”.

Hello and welcome. You might have come here from my Twitter profile or because of a tweet I sent you. Here I will quickly say and retain for re-use what my Twitter usage is about and how both you and I can enjoy what I do here. You could call it my Twitter manifesto, but that sounds too hoity-toity. So here goes:

What I do on Twitter

1. I use Twitter as a channel out. I find something, I send a link/picture to share.
2. This is me, so it is unfiltered. About 70% is technical web stuff (great resources, talks, videos, conference coverage), 25% is fluffy or awesome things on the web (hedgehogs, kittens, puppies…) and 5% is me doing stuff (trying restaurants, telling people I am meeting IRL where I am, wondering about things). I use naughty words, I find it hypocritical to add a * where an i or a u should be. I try to use them less though, but there might be things that make you blush.
3. I tweet a lot – I know quite a few people who keep unfollowing and following me because of that reason.
4. If you do not want the noise and just the meat, there is a way – I linked my Twitter to pinboard, so all the links I send out are here.
5. I monitor Twitter for great things and see how you come across on it, too. This resulted in the past in people I liked becoming my colleagues or them starting to write for blogs I am editor at. It also resulted in people speaking at events. I like introducing people to each other. If you come across too aggressive, demanding or simply out of line, I will also take note of that and answer accordingly when people ask me about you.
6. If I post something in quotes followed by a link, this is a quote, not my view. Don’t tell me your problems, tell the author, please.

What I don’t do on Twitter

1. Advertise. I work for Microsoft, but I am not the marketing channel for Microsoft, there are other places for that. When I tweet about Microsoft stuff then it is because I think it is great, same way I tweet about Google, Mozilla, Adobe, Twitter, Facebook and many many more.
2. I will not fix your problems. If you have an issue with a Microsoft product, there are official channels. If you have an issue with a Mozilla product (where I was for quite some time), the only – and let me repeat this – the only, best and fastest way to get something fixed is to file a bug in bugzilla about it. I don’t have a magic power over engineers to fix things faster or force them to do things. If your problem is a real, fixable issue and you are explaining the issue and what needs fixing, things happen. If you shout “this sucks, no wonder your competition is winning” then it is no wonder when busy engineers don’t really listen to you. You want your problem fixed, talk to the fixer. I will not fight your fights for you as I don’t feel your pain and can only guess the details.
3. Plan and automate my tweets. This is all raw, nothing here is automated and yes it is only me. So when I am not in, I will not answer. Mostly this means I am on a plane.
4. I will not retweet things you beg me to retweet*. I have quite some reach and I will retweet things I like and consider useful. If you tell me about something I might retweet it, I might not. This could mean I don’t like it but in many cases it just means I am too busy to do so. Nudge me again reminding me why something is cool. Begging or threatening to call me stuck-up and not helping struggling new people on the web will not get you anything though. If you look at what I do, you know that I am not the kind of guy to not support a great new thing or cause.
5. Spread personal things. I have a real life and I will never share all the boring or sordid details about it. Both you and me are busy.
6. Follow much and favourite. Both of these things are random in my case. My faves do not mean much – I found people favourite to read later. I never do that. I keep the tab open, read and then tweet about it. I have a full inbox, no need to also have a full faves list. Following is also not a sign of how much I like you or that I don’t appreciate you. I use Twitter mostly as a channel out. My information I get from RSS - I am oldschool like that.

Shit that can happen

1. If you tell me once about something, I might miss it – this is a fast paced medium with a terrible search functionality. So email me about important things, too.
2. I can be out of line – if you feel annoyed about something, please tell me. I am happy to follow you so you can DM me – I am always happy to improve.

Yesterday Edgeconf attracted about 150 (my guess) bleeding edge web technology enthusiasts to come to the Facebook offices in London, England and listen to seven panels of experts.

Over the day we covered Offline storage, Network detection and optimisation, Performance, Responsive Layout, Input formats, Privileged access to hardware and Testing and Tooling. The format was slightly different than other conferences. Each panel consisted of experts from various companies heavily involved in the subject matter and the audience and people not attending the conference could submit questions beforehand that were selected and collated by an expert moderator. The panels had a ten minute presentation easing the audience into the subject matter and then it was free Q&A using the submitted questions and audience participation.

The weapon of choice for all this was Google Moderator, a tool built for that purpose and heavily used inside Google. All in all the message of the conference was to go deep and detailed on a subject matter and to stay as brief as possible – 30 to 60 seconds answers at the most.

The conference was jam-packed with very detailed information and the attendees had a good chance for the low price of 50 GBP to meet experts and get their questions answered. Break-out rooms also allowed for unconference-style impromptu sessions but I am not sure how much they were used.

All the sessions got video recorded, transcribed and the videos will be available with time-stamped transcription for easy access to the sections that interest you.

All the coverage of the event will be published on the conference hub page.

I was very impressed with how the conference was organised and run. Andrew Betts and team are incredibly detailed and there was no question from me how my session would go or how to contact the panelists. All the communication and collaboration happened painlessly over email and collaborative web tools and the day ran like clockwork. This is of course also very much thanks to Facebook offering the location and Google the filming and transcribing.

A nice little touch was that at the end of the conference there was a full disclosure how much money was made and what it was spent on. The 3000 GBP extra were donated to Codeclub.

Edgeconf was very much value for money with the incoming funds going into recording and making the results of the show available to everyone, food and travel for the experts. There was no merchandise, no overly aggressive marketing or obvious sponsorship. Everybody involved was an expert who needed to be there. I very much enjoyed that and it was refreshingly different to bigger shows that run on more traditional concepts of marketing and sponsorship.

It was a very intense day of detailed information and there was no lull in the whole show. For a one day conference this is perfect and I am sure that there will be more sequels to come. I have to congratulate everyone involved for putting on an impressive show and getting everybody organised without much hassle.