The adoption of HTML5 and its surrounding cast of powerful new features is going to be a huge boon to web users and points towards a very positive direction for the future of the web. From the smoother interfaces of canvas, local storage enabling offline modes for online email programs and the like seamlessly, online video free of dependencies like Flash, web sockets making the real time web a breeze without all the current AJAX workarounds, and so much more but I’ll save all of those for future posts….

Today I wanted to finish up and release an experiment using the HTML5 Geolocation feature (sticklers, click here), a feature allowing your web browser (with your permission of course) to share your location, enabling any current website to tailor itself right to where you are… a powerful feature for todays increasingly mobile web user.

Why is This Important?

Today this level of convenience, all the applications you use every day seamlessly knowing where you are, is unheard of for the user as well as the web developer outside of proprietary built “apps” on iPhone or Android you need to seek out and download. But little do most people know those web browsers in their pockets on those same devices can do this today, opening the playing field of a personal local experience up to the entire web… no downloads, no waiting, no device lock-in.

The Experiment

My experiment started with a simple need, in the summer I drive a Jeep to work with a soft top and I prefer to have it down as much as possible, I mean sun in Minnesota only happens for a short stint i need to suck it up. What I needed was a simple view of the current temperature, maybe a radar map to look for any rain on the map coming my direction, not a huge list. In the early summer I quickly built a one page HTML and JavaScript mashup using jQuery, HTML5 (or Google Gears as a fallback) and the Weather Underground API to build a web page that did just that, polished it up a bit (let’s call it a working prototype as of today) and hosted it on Google App Engine purely for worry free scalability to show it to you all.

Initially on load my experiment “Weather GEO” asks if I want to share my location, of course I select yes, this allows my browser to pull a location from my GPS, Wifi or internet address depending on what the device sees fit.

It passes that longitude and latitude back to my page’s JavaScript I in turn query Weather Underground for the next two forecast elements and a radar map for that longitude and latitude and display them as soon as they come back…

Pretty slick… solves a problem in a simple way, just one click from a browser bookmark, no custom proprietary “app” code to build and it will work in every browser when HTML5 is fully adopted, but currently works in the major mobile browsers, Android and iPhone, in FireFox 3.5+ and any browser that has Google Gears on the PC, Mac and Linux… thats more than enough for me.

A great example of where the web is going and how progress on open standards like this benefit everyone, give my little experiment a try here http://bctx.info/wx. Let me know how it works for you, if your device is passing your proper location and what you think in the comments. Currently I am seeing the Droid have a problem with the code and have posted to the Android Developers Google Group.

* Ok, technically Geolocation is part of the W3C Geolocation Working Group, not HTML5 but it will largely be implemented with HTML5 so it really has become part and parcel of the browser based future.

My back story: I recently got into a friendly argument with some Mobile experts on a RWW Live: Mobile App Development call, I threw on my rosy colored glasses and spoke of a time where the Mobile web browser has access to device features like GPS, Contacts, etc we could leverage what we learned on the web and build even cooler more contextual and helpful Mobile Web apps that worked everywhere… and was told maybe… someday… but for the foreseeable future we’ll be building our apps 20+ times and asking carriers permission to do so (listen to the MP3, really!)… well the news today strikes me well, the glasses are rosy again!

Mozilla has the Vision

Today Mozilla fires the first shots across the bow of the future Mobile web, or as Mitchell Baker and many others put it “One Web.” Today Mozilla launched the first alpha release of Fennec it’s mobile browser that has goals to re-envision how we will use our Mobile device’s simple web browsers. [Quotes from FennecVision]

Fennec will bring a true Web experience to mobile phones and other non-PC devices, yet take advantage of the specific opportunities for new and useful user experiences enabled by mobility and telephony.

Even in it’s first release it will break huge ground delivering the first of breed access to the device’s GPS and they have goal to do the same across many other device features.

It will integrate smoothly with device features, including easy initiation of phone calls from Web pages, access to local search, maps and directions.

Curing Fragmentation? (ok at least a start)

Fennec will be the mobile Web browser that content and application developers can target to create great software for mobile phones, rather than the plethora of native platforms and programming languages required to reach people in a mobile environment today. Any developer with skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be able to develop for mobile.

Hard to argue with any of this, in my mind aside from the carriers this is the biggest limitation seen today with Mobile development.

Don’t overlook this Mobile Web milestone

This seemingly small browser release will in the future be noted as a milestone in the evolution of Mobile and the Mobile Web. The path this release sets into motion, I believe, will make possible to reuse the years of learning we’ve compiled as the web grew up moving our experiences Mobile with the same rich capabilities of the browser we have on the desktop. On top of that web learning we throw in access to key Mobile features like GPS and likely soon address book and calling… the ability to really build for a users context is now real, making the Mobile web browser the true platform of the future… and delivering, as closely as possible, One Web. A web that sits in the palm of your hand and works seamlessly with your life regardless of your current location or device.

Rosy indeed… -Ben