Emerging Web Standards

[Devx: Latest Published]

The web has come a long way from its standards being largely controlled by two major browser makers — Netscape & Microsoft, who largely dictated web standards based off of what those two browsers supported with every new release. New players (Firefox, Chrome, Opera) entered the web battleground and helped move the web towards standardization. The tipping point was reached when the web stack got a major upgrade in the form of HTML5, CSS3 and additions to JavaScript API. The future looks bright for web development with amazing new features being added to the web platform. Here are some of the prominent features that will be available to web developers to use in the not so distant future:

Web Components — Web Components is a set of cutting edge standards that allows us to build widgets for the web will full encapsulation. The encapsulation inherent in the web components solves the fundamental problem with widgets built out of HTML & JavaScript as the widget isn't isolated from the rest of the page and global styles. The main parts comprising Web Components are:

1. HTML Templates — Reusable templates/html fragments. Read more.
2. Shadow DOM — This is what enables encapsulation for a section of an html page/widget by introducing a new element (known as 'shadow root') in the DOM tree. Read more.
3. Custom Elements — Custom elements are probably the best new thing available out of the box for web developers as they allow us to define new HTML elements without the need for an external library (if you've used angularjs, think custom directives). With custom elements you can have something like below in your html
   
   <contoso-timeline></contoso-timeline>
   
   Assuming contoso is the namespace under with your timeline control goes. That one line encapsulates the complete functionality of the timeline control. Neat! Read about custom elements in more detail.

Google has released an amazing library called Polymer that is worth a look. It's essentially a polyfill for web components.

Not all browsers support Web Components today. The latest builds of Chrome & Opera do have the support for web components. What features are supported by which browsers can be checked at caniuse.com.

To get a sense of what is coming in the future releases of each browser, you can check the respective bleeding edge versions — Chrome Canary, Firefox Nightly, Opera Next and IE.