HTML5 and Dovetail Support Suite
At Dovetail, we’re always staying on top of the latest and greatest technology. We’re constantly evaluating new technologies and finding creative ways of incorporating that into our products in sensible and meaningful ways. We’ve been experimenting with HTML5 and CSS3 (the less-often-mentioned, but equally important brother of HTML5) for some time now.
We’ve been thinking of ways of enhancing existing features or adding new features that take care of some of the exciting capabilities of HTML5 and CSS3. I’d like to discuss in this post a few of the things we’ve come up with.
Enhanced Reporting and Visualizations
One of the more exciting and major features in HTML5 is the “canvas” technology which allows native visualizations and 2D vector drawing without the need for third-party plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash player or Microsoft’s Silverlight. Also, as part of the push by browser authors to provide HTML5 functionality, they have also added SVG (Simple Vector Graphics) support. While not new and technically not HTML5, SVG support has only recently, officially been added to all the major browsers and is usually lumped in with exciting technologies related to HTML5. We’re playing with a number of HTML5 Canvas and SVG reporting graphic visualizers and charting libraries.
At the top of this section is a screenshot of a sample chart creating using only HTML5 Canvas, JavaScript, and CSS from the filament group (no special plugins such as Flash or Silverlight were required to render this).
Drag and drop file uploads
Another exciting feature enabled by the push to implement HTML5 and modern features in the major browsers is the ability to drag files from your desktop or folder explorer into the browser to attach files to web applications. You can see this in action today using Google’s GMail or YouTube services (see screenshot above). Dovetail is planning on incorporating this technology into our Support Suite application to allow you attach files to cases and emails in our app seamlessly like a native application.
Better browser compatibility
While not as exciting as the other features, this one removes a lot of frustration both from us as web developers and you as a consumer using your favorite browser. One of the nice side-effects of the negotiation and voting process of the HTML5 standards body is that the major browser vendors have come together like never before and agreed on many standards and their standard implementation. Personally, I think this will lead to an explosion of creativity and productivity on the web like never before as application creators like Dovetail will have to spend far less time worrying about browser compatibility and more time writing really meaningful and engaging functionality that provides real value to our customers.
As a result, we’re currently testing and planning to add support for more major browsers in upcoming releases.
Better navigation with the back and forward buttons
With the advent of AJAX technology (which allows the browser to get updates to portions of a page without reloading the entire page), usability of web applications has been greatly enhanced. Unfortunately this came at a price of confusing the back and forward buttons as well as the URL in the address bar representing what’s currently on the screen. This made it difficult to bookmark the exact page and state you were viewing, and would render the back button useless in many scenarios.
While there were some workarounds before the advent of HTML5, HTML5 introduces a more formal and straightforward way for software programmers to make sure that the back button works as you would expect as well as keeping the URL in the address bar reliably bookmark-able.
In Dovetail Support Suite, we use a lot of AJAX and there are a few areas of the application that don’t work as well as we’d like with the back button and the address bar. In an upcoming release, using HTML5’s History API and “pushState” feature, we are planning on enhancing our navigation to be more bookmark-friendly.
Better overall
In this post I’ve showed you just a few of the things currently made possible by the push to HTML5 in the major browsers and how Dovetail is working to integrate them into our products. Our goal is to bring the latest technology to you in a meaningful and productive way — not just because it’s flashy or edgy!
