23 August 2011, 15:57

From Mozilla: WebAPI for HTML5 experience on phones

Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has announced the introduction of WebAPI, a project intended to "to provide a basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months". The goal is to provide a set of APIs consistent across browsers, operating systems and devices, that enable common methods of access to phone functionality. The list of functions given in the announcement includes the dialer, address book, SMS, clock, camera, calculator and maps.

A posting on the MozillaWiki gives further details about the project, and explains that when the specification is complete and a prototype implementation ready, the new API will be submitted to the W3C for possible standardisation. The wiki page stresses that security will have a high priority in the development: "We wouldn't want any random webpage to be able to read the users contact list, or able to issue arbitrary commands to any USB device which is hooked up to the users computer."

Those wishing to follow development or contribute to Mozilla's WebAPI can do so via the dev-webapi mailing list or the mozilla.dev.webapi discussion group.

(ehe)

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