Benefits and pitfalls of using HTML5 APIs for online experiments and simulations

Abstract

The most recent advances in the architecture of the Web allow using it as an excellent platform to deliver experiments and simulations over the Internet. However, there are still some challenges related to the animations' accuracy, to user input collection or to real-time communications that have to be accomplished to properly port native application- based experiments and simulations to the Web. The limitations of the standards preceding HTML5 have forced web developers to embed non-HTML objects using a wide range of non-standard plugins and causing an extremely fragmented execution environment where features must be implemented several times in different programming languages to guarantee full compliance with every user-agent. As HTML5 provides a standard -yet full-featured- environment to develop and execute applications, web user-agents are now more similar to application players than to simple Internet browsers. In this paper we analyze the benefits and pitfalls of these new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), providing examples of both good and bad instances of research-related use.