SharePoint and HTML5 investigation (Part 1)

Background

If you’re a web developer you will have heard about the new version of HTML, version 5. It has been lauded as the next step in standardization of online functionality. But the standard will also not be final until 2022. And unless you’re doing a state-of-the-art website or mobile application, you’ll probably won’t have a lot of professional experience with it.

It’s a fact that HTML5 is up and coming, but older browsers are lagging behind and will be heavily used for quite some time. So the question arises, is HTML 5 already a valid platform for development?

Browser statistics from March 2012 say that Internet Explorer ‘s (that has limited HTML5 support) share is still around 35-40%. That’s a lot of users you’d exclude if you’d use a HTML5 solution without support for older browsers.

By observing the following statistics on HTML tags and doctype usage we can see the percentage of sites using html5 is not large yet, but it’s definitely growing. The widespread belief among designers and developers that html5 is the future will of course probably be a decisive factor in its adoption.

With the increased use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets html5 seems the only possible way forward in creating solutions for multiple devices.

And even if it’s not very useful right now, researching a good way to implement HTML5 as well as support older browsers is simply a fun exercise!

Modernzr or HTML5shiv

Right now the most used method to create HTML5 that is also supported in older browsers is by using JavaScript libraries like html5shiv and Modernizr to trick older browsers into thinking they understand HTML5. See another blog of mine with more info on those methods and why I think I didn’t waste time doing it in another way J

SharePoint as platform (for HTML5)

SharePoint, when it’s used without customization as a standard package will sometimes evoke quite some unloving responses. However, it is very widely used with reason.

When used as a development platform and utilizing the built-in Publishing framework or other parts of the Object Model you can create a very strong, custom experience for internet, intranet or extranet.

The extensive web application platform capabilities make it possible to integrate with backend systems like SAP or web services fairly easily for a professional developer, while allowing a good administration experience for content creators.

It is a complete CMS, Publishing, ECM, Collaboration platform/solution. Both a plus as well as a minus is that it does a lot of things moderately well. Customization will make it do what you want very well.

A negative regarding using SharePoint for creating a HTML5 site is that it contains a lot of useful webparts, a lot of which might not be useable out of the box in an HTML5 site and would need to be extended. However, for a publishing system the standard webparts will not often be used bar a few of them, the rest would be extended anyway or custom functionality would be created.

The most useful webparts for Publishing: the Content Editor and the Content Query could still be utilized in my solution (since they can create their own HTML output).

The general question I’ll try to answer as best as possible is the following:

How can we best utilize the SharePoint 2010 platform to function with new browser capabilities and display devices using HTML5?


Continue to Part 2

Part 1 is about the background for the investigation on this subject, why HTML  5 + SharePoint.

Part 2 is about the work that was done, it contains links to the code and solution overview.

Part 3 is about the results that were found, and should get a discussion going on what can be improved and other possible paths to pursue.