As a general rule, when thinking about implementing technologies, don’t look
for fallbacks only for people who are on old web browsers. Think about how
you can provide a great experience to all users who want to get the most out
of the product or service you’ve created.10.1 The Future
The techniques we talked about in this chapter, although not all part of
HTML5 proper, represent the future of web development. We’ll be pushing
many more things to the client side. Better history management makes Ajax
and client-side applications much more intuitive and responsive for users.
Sites like GitHub and Flickr take advantage of the History API right now while
using fallbacks to ensure things work where full support isn’t available. Web
Sockets can replace periodic polling of remote services for the display of real-
time data. Now that the protocol has stabilized, you can expect to see Web
Sockets becoming even more popular when creating real-time web applications,
especially now that Internet Explorer 10 supports this feature.Cross-Document Messaging lets us merge web applications that usually would
never be able to interact, and Geolocation lets us build better location-aware
web applications, which become more and more relevant every day with the
growing mobile computing market.Drag and Drop is maturing, too. Using the File API,^13 it’s possible to create
applications that let users drag files from their desktops onto the browser.
Once more browsers support the File API, you can create a drag-and-drop
file uploader without requiring Flash or Silverlight.Explore these APIs and keep an eye on their adoption. You may soon find
these to be invaluable tools in your web-development toolbox.13.http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/Chapter 10. Creating Interactive Web Applications • 238
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