Sencha has revealed its HTML5 wish-list for 2012, and also what from its 2011 list came true. According to the post by Michael Mullany, the hit-rate during 2011 was four out of 10. Those items that came to pass were a richer CSS3 effects toolbox, high-performance 'position: fixed' for mobile, pervasive GPU acceleration, and websockets stabilisation.
Accordingly, 2012's list includes some holdovers from 2011 and a number of new hopes, which Mullany calls "a motley collection of what we think would be most interesting for developers creating the rich and responsive applications that HTML5 was built for". These include HTML5 audio quality, better offline caching, 'WebGL everywhere', and 'right-sizing images', to deliver more appropriate sizes to mobile devices, and superior mobile browser debugging.
Chris Mills, co-chair of the Web Education Community Group and dev.opera.com editor, told us he mostly liked the look of the list, but noted Sencha "seems to be implying CSS3 is a part of HTML5, which is rather confusing". He added that anyone calling for better mobile debugging should check out Opera Dragonfly, "which has had decent mobile debugging capabilities for a while, albeit only for Opera Mobile. But the protocols this runs on are open source, so there is nothing stopping the creators of other browsers from adding in Opera Dragonfly support".
Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson agreed with a number of Sencha's hopes: "On right-sized images, I'd like a simple, declarative – mark-up, not script – way to send different-dimension images to different devices, like my <picture> idea. It would also need a media-query way and JavaScript way to check network speed. I'd also like to see agreement regarding Audio API formats. There are two before the WG. At Opera we like some degree of spec stability before we implement, because you have no idea how many times we've had to dump code written to old specs."
On offline caching, Lawson added that he'd "like to see the different browser vendors working together – in an HTML5 way – rather than working in the current 'IE4 versus Netscape 4' way with regard to manifest formats," but he noted that Sencha's request for 'HTML media implementations' was gaining ground, as evidenced by his post on getUserMedia.
What's on your personal HTML5 wish-list? And what still frustrates you about CSS? Let us know in the comments!
