I always thought staying up all night hacking away at code during hackathons was crazy, but our friends in Sweden just took it up a notch. Mozilla recently attended the Moysnc Hackathon in Stockholm. The catch was that it took place inside of an old, disused nuclear reactor from the 50s.
Why they chose a creepy place like that for a hackathon is beyond me, but Mozilla was on a mission. While the Mosync hackathon was focused on Wormhole and Reload, applications that let you build apps based on HTML5 or C++, Mozilla showed up to talk about HTML5 and the future of the Web.
The talk is called, “HTML5 and the Near-Future of the Web.” It’s presented in slide format with audio commentary. Like always, Mozilla has a fascinating take on the the future of the Web via HTML5. If you aren’t in a position to watch 27 minutes of video, you can also view the slides here. It’s important to note that the slides are presented in HTML5 as well with links to all the demos in the video.
One of the biggest talking points was Emscripten, a conversion software that converts C++ to Javascript. We covered this previously as it was used to port a simple flash game to open Web standards. Mozilla has much higher aspirations for Emscripten in the future.
The other things you will see in the talk are CSS demos showing off 3D transformation that creates 3D environments akin to WebGL. They also discuss issues with HTML5 audio which were made apparent with the Emscripten conversion process.
For something a bit more interesting for the person not interested in the code, they also go over HTML5 and how it will affect games. They bring up BrowswerQuest, the HTML5 powered MMO, as an example of what HTML5 wil do for gaming. They also bring show off demos of new HTML5 APIs for fullscreen, mouselock and gamepads. Here’s a video showing off the Gamepad API as it’s powering a “kitten cube” in browser:
As for the rest of the talk, it goes into what they’re working on for mobile. This goes into talking about WebRTC and Boot to Gecko as main talking points. They also cover the mobile APIs that are currently available for testing.
Mozilla is always one of the most fascinating companies when it comes to developments in HTML5. They always offer insightful commentary alongside witty banter that makes their talks so much more approachable to those of us who don’t have extensive experience in the field. Check out the video for yourself to see what Mozilla thinks is the future of the Web: