When something new comes along, the old has to give away. Do you believe so? HTML5 is evolving and is already well supported by most of the smart phones and leading browsers. Ipad/IPhone enabled websites are all powered with HTML5. With increasing usage of Smart Phones, there is a compulsory need for every website to have a mobile friendly version. With the promising features like Offline support, enhanced multimedia, graphics, interactive Drag & Drop and advanced UI forms, HTML5 will eventually become the standard of the web.
Editors for HTML5:
The specification for this major version of HTML is not finalized yet. Probably because of this reason, there are not much HTML5 editors available for developers. Till HTML4, W3C would finalize the specification first and then the browsers and editors would start to implement them. With Google and Apple heavily backing up HTML5, browsers have started implementing the draft version of HTML5 and kept moving forward on their browse race. Developers are left with only a few options to choose their favorite editor for HTML5. The editors available on markets like Dreamweaver CS5, Aloha Editor (WYSIWYG based) are licensed and heavily priced. Web developers are forced to use Text Editors like Textpad, Editplus, Notepad++ or Eclipse IDE without any additional help for quick reference.
Eclipse & HTML5:
With the support of third party plug-in like Aptana Studio 3.0 beta, Eclipse (Version 3.4 or above) is able to provide HTML5 support for developers to some extent. The good thing about this plug-in is that, it supports code assistant for JQuery (Version 1.4.2). For web developers, this is a great boon, I would bet. The code assistant tool recognizes HTML4 tags well but eclipse will flag a compilation error for new HTML5 tags. Even the latest version of Eclipse 3.6 does not have a built in support of HTML5. Aptana has little support for CSS3 and built in Preview option for HTML files.. To install the plugin,
- Open Eclipse 3.4 or above
- Help Install New Software
- Give the URL http://update.aptana.com/update/studio/3.2 and click on Add.
- Select Aptana Studio and Click Next.
Netbeans & HTML5:
Netbeans.org has recently released their Beta version of IDE 7.0 with HTML5, Javascript, CSS, AJAX, JSON and JavaFX formatting support. The interesting feature about this release is that the code assistant tool is able to identify most of the HTML5 tags supported by leading browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. The code assistant tool briefs the HTML5 tag syntax, attributes and the browsers that currently support the tag. It also shows example code with appropriate syntax and suggestions. The code assistant works out well for Javascript and CSS files as well but there is no support for JQuery. It also has an option to view the HTML5 specification (draft specification as of September 2010) in a separate browser. There is no need to update or install plug-ins for HTML5 support on it.
It would be great if we have the power of Aptana on Netbeans. But they themselves are competitors on Ruby and PHP front. We have to wait for Aptana Studio to fully support HTML5 or Netbeans to support JQuery. When something new comes along, it doesn’t mean that the old has to fail. They can live in harmony with one another and generate greater results. Agree?
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