The case for HTML5 for TradingFloor.com's tools

What if my browser doesn't support HTML5?
This question pops up now and then. So here is some guidance on the topic.

Although we may have some alternatives for our tools and other content, like the one figured below, we would really like you to read on to find out why we think support of HTML5 in your browser will enhance your experiences on TradingFloor and the rest of the Internet and how easy it is to get. 

The figure above shows a new interactive table of correlations available here. 

Some users might be occasionally encountering messages on certain pages of TradingFloor, in particular in the tools section, which read something like "the tool is only supported by the latest browsers".

What does this actually mean and why is this the case?

What we are really saying is related to one particular thing: HTML5, the modern code that describes how webpages look and behave.

HTML5 is a new version of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML for short). It is actually composed of the HTML itself, which structures the webpage, CSS (short for Cascading Style Sheets) that contains the details of the webpage's presentation, and JavaScript, which is the programming that makes the webpage interactive and do different things.

HTML5 isn't really all that new and it is not just one thing. Although work began on a new standard for HTML by the middle of the last decade, it was probably Steve Job's announcement in 2010 in an open letter, Thoughts on Flash, that "rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards" that conveyed to the world what HTML5 was and was going to be on the Internet. By this, he meant that "HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash)".

In a nutshell, HTML5 is designed to do nearly anything that can be expected of a webpage, such as animations and applications, audio and video, and much complex computation that you often don't see but that is essential to the rich experience of many sophisticated web spaces. As an open standard, it means that there is no additional cost associated with any of this functionality.

We waited until there was large-scale, mainstream support in users' browsers for HTML5 before releasing many of our apps on TradingFloor, however, there came a point where it was more important to move things ahead than to cater to the shortcomings in any obscolescing web browsers. We know that no more than 20% of the visits to TradingFloor at any time are made using browsers that don't support a few of the elements of the HTML5 standard that we are using in our more advanced applications, and this number is shrinking rather briskly.

If obtaining a web browser that supports HTML5 were in any way prohibitive, that might give us pause to consider how much reliance we should put on browser support for the standard by our visitors' machines, but web browsers are arguably the most ubiquitous applications out there, and they are virtually all free and extremely easy to download and install (including inheriting things like bookmarks from older versions and even across platforms). So, even if Internet Explorer 9 (already released in March 2011!) requires a Windows 7 operating system, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are all available at literally a click of a button for those users who might still be using Windows XP or Vista.

Does all this warrant a blog post? We feel it does, because we have our eyes fixed on a lot of developments for the near future and we want to make sure that all members of our community are able to participate in their use.

However, if for some reason members are not able to use a recent version of one of the many browsers that support the HTML5 elements we are using, such as the FX Correlations tool, we may be able to still provide something in the older standard.

The figure above shows a new interactive table we have implemented for the Forex Correlations module. It is not programmed with the Canvas element of HTML5 and therefore should work in browsers like Internet Explorer 8. Additionally, it offers another - more conventional - view on the data that may be useful alongside other ways of exploring.

Finally, we would like to leave you on this note (or a whole song and dance, actually): Google has produced a fantastic little book in HTML5, 20 things I learned about browsers and the web, with a great chapter à la madrigal on the importance of using modern browsers, which we heartily encourage you to read.