HTML 5 Features on Mobile Browsers

Earlier today I looked for some help from the smarty folks that I follow on Twitter:

Both @sophistifunk and my colleague @rragan responded that I should look at @ppk's HTML 5 compatibility table and WebKit comparison table. Now these are great resources, and I already had an appreciation for them. However, even put together, they do not, in my opinion, accurately describe the state of mobile web browser capabilities.

Let me take a step back. First it should be said that I hate web standards. Seriously. As someone who has spent much of his adult life developing web applications, I understand why people like standards. Having to write code that is specific for each browser will drive you insane. I don't want to do that anymore than anyone else. However, standards are ex post facto so to speak. It is great to take things and create standards around them, but it is a losing battle to look to standards for innovation. If we had done that, there would be no such thing as Ajax -- or it could only be implemented using hidden IFrames...

With that in mind, I have never given much faith to HTML 5 as a standards lead revolution. This is one of the flaws in the compatibility/comparison tables. Let me give you a couple of examples. The WebKit comparison table shows that neither Android 1.0 or 1.5 supports geolocation (I know, I know, geolocation is a separate specification, but practically it is lumped in with HTML 5). Anybody with an Android phone knows that this is patently false. The Android browser defaults to Google's mobile home page, which uses the geolocation API to echo your location to you -- if you browser supports geolocation. So did @ppk just get this wrong? No, not really. The catch is that the Android browser is not just WebKit, it is also Gears, which implements the HTML 5 geolocation completely. So anybody using an Android phone (and there's going to be a lot of such folks very soon), has a geolocation-enabled browser. But you would not know this from reading the WebKit table.

Another example is app cache. This is specification meant to enable offline applications. Again the WebKit table says that it is not supported in any Android browser. However, this functionality is once again implemented using Gears. In this case, I don't think it follows the specification exactly. Oh well.

Oh, and one last nitpick... The HTML 5 comparison does not even mention database APIs. This is supported by the latest versions of the browsers in the iPhone and Android (and it has been for 1yr+ in both I think.) Yeah I know, @ppk can only run so many tests, and that will probably be listed in the future...

I'm really not trying to diss @ppk and the data provided on quirksmode. It is tricky to assess mobile browser capabilities. That's why I was trying to be lazy in the first place and hope that somebody had done all of the hard work for me!