Web Forefront

So what is this process being held by the Open AJAX alliance all about ? Well, they have a list of 37 active features they would like to see incorporated into browsers for the benefit AJAX development, since that's the whole purpose of the alliance of course.

Interestingly enough since AJAX is pretty comprehensive, these 37 features touch everything from Security, Client-Server communication, CSS, W3C standards, JavaScript and Performance in browsers, making the process a pretty good TODO list for future browser versions.

So what's the community consensus on the most pressing need for browser support ? With a little over 80+ votes, the clearest interest seems to be in support of Better 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics support , the second with 80 votes comes in the form of Native JSON Parsing , and the third with close to 80 votes comes for Support for HTML 5's <video> and <audio> tags . Also interesting is the highest average points (8 out of 10 points for most important ) for any one feature, given to DOM Performance with close to 70 votes overall.

And lets not forget the commentary for each of the 37 features being voted on , providing some insightful and often blunt technical opinion, such as those made on support for 2D Drawing / Vector Grahpics:

• "WebKit and Opera now support nearly all of SVG, and Mozilla mainly lacks animation. MS's lack of SVG support is a huge blot against its support for open standards. SVG has been a REC since 2001."
• "Native SVG Support for all Browsers - IE8 please?"
• "What about 3D browsing (something completely different)? See http://www.spacetime.com/ . I'm not entirely convinced but a convergence between virtual worlds and browsing might be useful."
• "For me as a GIS developer, the lack of decent vector support in IE is a nightmare as far as trying to create vector maps (the next level of raster maps). VML is obviously burried by MS in favour of Silver-Flash-Light and the old Adobe SVG plugin is not "

And a comment on DOM performance, which I couldn't agree more with "In addition to runtime performance, it is essential that "obvious" development practices do not result in memory leaks.", in essence, making DOM work on browsers just like it does on server-side Java, with no 'memory leaks' from using basic assignments or constructs.

Let's hope browser vendors are paying attention to this list for planning their future product road-maps, because this is clearly the consensus from the software community on what it wants to have in order to deliver better web applications to end users.