Prototyping Early W3C HTML5 Specifications

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by Peter Galli on December 22, 2010 03:48pm

In another significant Interoperability milestone Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Solutions here at Microsoft, this week announced the launch of the HTML5 Labs Web site, a place where we prototype early and not yet fully stable drafts of specifications developed by the W3C and other standard organizations. 

These prototypes will help Microsoft have informed discussions with developer communities, and give implementation experience with the draft specifications that will generate feedback to improve the eventual standards, Jean says, noting that the move also lets us give the community some visibility on those specifications we consider interesting from a scenario point of view, but which are still not at the stage where we can consider them ready for official product support.

As Jean explains in his blog, Microsoft's approach with Internet Explorer, outlined in a blog post by Dean Hachamovitch, the Corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, is to implement standards as they become site-ready for broader adoption.

This new HTML5 Labs Web site is the place where Microsoft's Interoperability Labs will publish prototype implementations of certain unstable and in-progress W3C, IETF, ECMA and other standards specifications still undergoing a lot of change. The first two prototypes delivered today are Web Sockets and IndexedDB.

WebSockets is a technology designed to simplify much of the complexity around bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels, over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket. It can be implemented in web browsers, web servers as well as used by any client or server application.

IndexedDB is a developing W3C Web standard for the storage of large amounts of structured data in the browser, as well as for high performance searches on this data using indexes. IndexedDB can be used for browser implemented functions like bookmarks, as well as for web applications like email.

We chose these two specifications primarily because they are potentially very useful but currently unstable.These are the two specifications we currently believe the community stands to benefit the most from, but both are in flux. 

In addition to Jean's blog and Dean's blog, you can read more about the WebSockets prototype on Tomasz Janczuk's blog and about the IndexedDB prototype on Pablo Castro's blog.

Enjoy!