From the beginning, Web users have had mixed feelings about the way their browser communicates. On one hand, the idea of a tightly controlled sandbox is appealing because it limits the damage a website may do to our personal data and to the Web as a whole. Without these controls, just clicking on a link could unleash viruses, worms, and worse.
On the other hand, programmers have always complained about the browser's restrictions, pointing out the ways they limit the services that might be made available. Every AJAX developer can easily identify one way they could make their code that much cooler and more awesome if only the browser would loosen the rules governing the sandbox, but just this once and only for their code.
[ Also on InfoWorld: "HTML5 in the browser: Canvas, video, audio, and graphics" and "HTML5 in the browser: Local data storage." ]
HTML5 is here to change this view toward communication -- radically in some ways and slightly in others. The rules for communication are changing, and in most cases, the developers are getting their wish. The limits are loosening but with enough strictures intact to provide greater flexibility without really endangering anyone.
The models should be familiar to most programmers because they're largely extensions of ideas that are common and generally successful in other parts of the stack. Most developers of user interfaces, for instance, arrange for the buttons and sliders to send events back and forth to other parts of the code called listeners. The HTML5 team extended this idea by arranging for code from different websites to tunnel through the wall between the different sandboxes that would normally prevent them from communicating. The sandboxes aren't being merged; the browser is simply offering a tunnel that's used only if both sandboxes agree to communicate.
All the specs have a similar flavor. The old idea of forcing the code to live in a sandbox isn't going away. The specs are just grafting on ways to use traditional approaches to break the difficult rules in a few simple and well-confined approaches. The sandboxes are growing well-guarded tentacles that link them to each other.
Cutting through complexity
The benefits to this should be obvious. Programmers have crafted a number of hacks to work around cross-site scripting and cross-site information fetching, and these add to the programming complexity and the network traffic. Many websites host proxies simply to get around these issues. The new HTML specs will let savvy programmers slice away at the layers with a machete, adding speed while cleaning up the code base.
The first place we'll start to see these new technologies appear will probably be in advertising. The most creative attempts to get us to part with our money already link together disparate parts of the pages. When the different blocks can communicate, these attempts will be even more clever. The aggregation sites that glue together widgets, RSS feeds, and other chunks of data will probably be next, although it's not clear that these need to offer the different building blocks a chance to communicate.
For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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