The Key Challenges Faced by Developers in HTML5 Development

# The Key Challenges Faced by Developers in HTML5 Development HTML5 is a very popular language to build attractive web applications and is one of the most promising technologies in the years to come. ... HTML5 has certainly opened up opportunities for powerful web application development, but it has even introduced certain challenges from the development perspective. We have listed some key challenges that developers might face, while building HTML apps. - There are various browser options available for the internet users. Earlier the leading browser was Internet Explorer and now many other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are prevalent. While developing HTML5 web applications, it becomes important to resolve the compatibility issues as developers have to do coding in a way to make the apps behave similarly if not identically on various browsers. - HTML5 developers face fragmentation issues while making the application, mobile compatible. When optimizing the web applications for mobile, the system webview element is used and this element is connected to the OS version of Smartphone’s. Users need to update their OS regularly for the webview to get new features and updates. Millions of Smartphone’s users are there using different OS and their versions, which might not be updated regularly, thus posing challenges for developers in providing an enriched experience to the entire user-base of Smartphone’s. - Though HTML5 apps provide an optimized experience to Smartphone’s users, they fail to utilize various device-specific features like NFC, camera and more that can’t be accessed from a browser. This poses challenges for developers in delivering users an experience similar to a native app. - Many big domains still use Internet Explorer as a primary browser; but many of the HTML5 elements don’t work or work partly with IE 8 and lower versions. Developers have to face compatibility issues in such cases as there’s a problem with external libraries/frameworks too. Developers here are recommended to use the latest framework/library’s release. - There are risks of the code being exposed if someone wants to break in. In HTML5 applications, most of the files are cached on the user machine. Users can thus access all JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files and view code if they wish to. Encrypting your HTML5 content will not work because browsers cannot execute the encrypted content. To resolve this issue, developers can resort to Minification or Obfuscation of code. - The performance of HTML5 apps is dependent on the mix and match of various technologies like CSS, JavaScript and WebRTC. Each one of these again has its own developer tooling, implementation, challenges and security issues. - HTML5 supports various video and audio formats, which makes it important for developers to include audio/video files of different formats to cover a wide range of devices. Developers are also required to create multiple versions of the same video within a size limit, for the video quality to get adapted to the users’ internet connection speed especially for Smartphone’s users. - HTML5 gives offline access, but the applications can only work with what has been cached in the browsers and in most of the cases it is not possible to cache application logic. - With HTML5, developers face the challenge of creating animation in sync with the audio. Though there are several ways of creating animation in HTML5, but they require much more efforts than what was required in Flash. Also it was easier to sync audio with animations through Flash Professional as compared to HTML5. In HTML5 there are very few tools available for the same. - HTML5 applications are difficult to test as the process includes testing the content presentation, the layout, the logic inside and more. Either the code may not be HTML5 compliant, or may not be compliant with a particular browser. It is challenging for the developers to conduct testing on various types of devices in real environments by continuously updating them.