HTML5

Neuranet's Flexitive

James Gray — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:24:05 +0000

The new Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Standard Ad Unit Portfolio's support for flexible ads is intended to improve the ad experience for users and boost revenue potential for advertisers. An updated solution from Neuranet, its Flexitive 2.0 responsive design software, is designed to solve today's design challenges and give media companies and agencies a significant advantage in adapting to the IAB's new Flex Specifications and Lean Guidelines that were released in summer 2017.

Flexitive 2.0 is the next generation of Neuranet's HTML5 cloud-based platform that supports more advanced responsive design capabilities for building high-quality, animated HTML5-based designs that adapt to unlimited sizes across any device, operating system, app or browser. The new standards were designed to promote user-friendly digital advertising that can scale across device types easily.

Flexitive also incorporates the LEAN principles of lightweight, encrypted, AdChoices-supported and non-invasive advertising. Neuranet emphasizes other key features of Flexitive 2.0, such as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding knowledge, unlimited sizing of a single design, two-click creative design variations with instant scaling, export for use in more than 30 ad servers and more.

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There's Browser in My SSH

Shawn Powers — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 21:44:27 +0000

by Shawn Powers

No, there's SSH in my browser! Although it may not be as logical of a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, for Chromebook users, an HTML5 SSH client is pretty amazing. Granted, Google's "crosh" shell has SSH abilities, but it's a very limited implementation. With the Chrome extension "Secure Shell", it's easy to SSH in to remote servers and interact like a traditional terminal window—mostly.

Secure Shell is getting better all the time, and at the time of this writing, it supports port forwarding, logging in with keys, socks proxying and even many keyboard shortcuts for programs like Irssi. The keyboard shortcut support isn't perfect, but for me at least, it's manageable.

Figure 1. It's simple. It's texty. It's awesome.

If you're a Chromebook user and want a real SSH client, give the "Secure Shell" extension a try. Heck, regardless of the OS you're using (I'm looking at you, Windows), it's a fast way to get a secure connection. It's being developed by Google, and it's free via the Play Store.

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Real-Time Messaging

Reuven Lerner — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:45:05 +0000

by Reuven Lerner

Want to send messages to all the browsers connected to your site? The pub-sub paradigm, run through Web sockets, might be just the solution.

Back in the 1980s, BSD UNIX introduced the idea of a "socket", a data structure that functioned similarly to a file handle, in that you could read from it or write to it. But, whereas a file handle allows a program to work with a file, a socket is connected to another process—perhaps on the same computer, but quite possibly running on another one, somewhere else on the Internet. Sockets brought about a communications revolution, in no small part because they made it easy to write programs that communicated across the network.

Today, we take that for granted. Dozens or hundreds of sockets are open on my computer at any given moment, and I don't know if they're communicating with local or remote programs. But, that's just the point—it's so easy to work with sockets, we no longer think of networked programs as anything special or unusual. The people who created sockets couldn't possibly have imagined the wide variety of protocols, applications and businesses that were built using their invention.

My point is not to praise sockets, but to point out that the inventors of a technology, particularly one that provides infrastructural support and a new abstraction layer, cannot know in advance how it'll be used.

In that light, consider a new network communication protocol called Web sockets, part of the standards known collectively as HTML5. To me, at least, Web sockets are the most undersold, least discussed parts of the HTML5 suite, with the potential to transform Web browsers into a fully fledged application platform.

Web sockets don't replace HTTP. Rather, much like BSD sockets, they provide bidirectional, long-term communication between two computers. The "bidirectional" and "long-term" aspects distinguish Web sockets from HTTP, in which the client sends a request, the server sends a response, and then the connection is terminated. Setting up a Web socket has very little overhead—and once communication is established, it can continue indefinitely.

Now that Web sockets exist, and are even supported by a growing number of browsers, what can you do with them? That question is still hard to answer, in no small part because Web sockets are so new. After all, if you had asked someone in the 1980s what you could do with BSD sockets, it's unlikely that streaming video would have come to mind.

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A Primer on HTML5

Shay David — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

by Shay David

There is good news: the “open Web”, a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox's successful introduction of open Web standards into their browser platform and the rapid adoption of Android on mobile phone, today we see many browser vendors and Web-enabled device manufacturers gravitating toward supporting vendor-neutral platforms for rich-media Web experiences. Only a few years ago, it seemed unlikely that tech giants (such as Google, Apple and Microsoft) and nonprofits (such as Mozilla) could agree on something so contentious as future standards for the Web. But because of the fragmented market across devices and the increasingly fragmented browser market on desktop computers, browser vendors and device makers are forced to move forward together or fall behind. There is bad news too. The vision of "write once publish anywhere" is far from reality. Like many contentious agreements, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details. The open future of media on the Web is far from guaranteed. In this article, I highlight how the industry is transitioning away from targeting a single vendor for rich-media Web experiences to targeting multiple rich-media Web browsers instead. In this environment, middle-layer solutions will bridge the small differences between implementations. The open Web traditionally has faced significant challenges when it comes to handling rich media such as video and audio. Rich media on the Web has been a battleground for proprietary solutions for years. Adobe Flash has won the current battle and is now the de facto standard for rich media on the desktop Web. However, Flash, is proprietary and is not supported by many devices, such as the iPhone and iPad. The new specifications for rich-media handling that are part of the W3C’s HTML5 standard, namely the and tags, are a great leap forward in addressing these challenges. They specify a vendor-neutral, device-neutral way of including rich media in Web pages, just like images are handled today. However, HTML5 requires a transition period. Until we have wide industry adoption and universal agreement on all the details of the specification, systems will be required to support existing proprietary media playback systems in cases where HTML5 is not supported. In the next few years, we're likely will see open-source JavaScript middle layers providing innovative and unified development platforms drawing from both Flash and HTML5 for building robust solutions for rich-media Web experiences. This robustness will include handling everything from analytics to playlists. During this transition period, developers can use JavaScript middle layers to bridge the current gaps between Flash and HTML5. This will provide a unified user experience, regardless of the browser and the underlying technologies that are used.

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HTML5

Neuranet's Flexitive

There's Browser in My SSH

Real-Time Messaging

A Primer on HTML5 and Why You Should Care About It

A Primer on HTML5