HTML5 performance is not inferior to native apps. Use building blocks to create HTML5 products

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You may have discovered that a fun and interesting HTML5 page will get much more user attention in WeChat Moments than those ordinary independent applications. With more and more mobile applications and more and more difficult to promote, should your product also have an HTML5 page?

If the answer is yes, then you might want to try Amaze UI, an open source HTML5 front-end framework. Using the web components, JS plug-ins, and cascading style sheets (CSS) it provides, you can quickly build an HTML5 product.

For those who often visit web pages on mobile devices, you may have noticed that a web page can be basically divided into menus, title bars, image galleries, content lists, and dividing lines. In Amaze UI, the official provides a variety of web components, and you can even build HTML5 products like building blocks.

In addition to the main web components mentioned above, accordion panels, headers, footers, image carousels, tabs, introductions, and paragraphs are all web components that developers can use directly in Amaze UI. Since Amaze UI is an open source product, some third-party developers are also constantly contributing special components to it. For example, when it comes to geographic location, users may need a map guide, then you can integrate the "Baidu Map" component; you may need a comment system under the article, then you can use the "Duoshuo" component; some service web pages may need customer service, then the "Meiqia Customer Service" component will naturally come in handy.

Of course, some developers may say that these elements are only part of a website. When you actually build a website, you may also need various interactive effects and text layout styles. This is when the usefulness of Amaze UI's JS components and CSS components becomes apparent.

Through JS components, developers can obtain a series of UI enhancement effects, such as warning boxes, smooth scrolling, loading progress bars, pop-up boxes, modal windows, drop-down components, button interactions, etc. Through CSS components, developers can directly integrate HTML elements such as buttons, forms, and tables, and use page components such as small badges, breadcrumb navigation, and button groups.

At present, Amaze UI has nearly 20 CSS components, 10 JS components and 17 web components with nearly 60 themes. According to CEO Chen Benfeng, compared with some foreign web front-end frameworks, Amaze UI will consider the needs of Chinese users more. For example, in terms of font layout, the Bootstrap front-end framework does not define Chinese fonts, so the display effect of your web page in different systems and browsers may be different, but Amaze UI defines Chinese fonts and optimizes for browsers with a relatively high market share in China, so this situation can be avoided.

For companies that are trying to make HTML5 products, you may still be in the shadow of Facebook, LinkedIn and other big companies "defecting" from HTML5 apps to native apps, because even today, some people still cite the above example when talking about HTML5. However, Shinji Ikari, an engineer who once worked on the Chrome team, told PingWest that the reason why Facebook made HTML5 apps so slowly was more due to Facebook itself, not because HTML5 was not good. Because technically speaking, the defect of HTML5 is not slow, but that it cannot scale. At that time, Facebook's HTML app was still using XML, so it can be said that their technology was quite backward.

In order to prove that the performance of HTML5 apps is not inferior to native apps, two engineers from Google specially created a Fastbook HTML5 app to show that Facebook's "defection" is not the fault of HTML5. According to Shinji Ikari, the performance of HTML5 apps could catch up with native apps two years ago, let alone now!

You may be curious, since HTML5's performance is not inferior to native apps, why are there so few high-quality HTML5 apps that we usually see? Chen Benfeng believes that this is more due to the lack of technical accumulation of developers in this field.

Shinji Ikari also said that for many applications, writing native apps is almost inevitable. If you are writing a 3D game and do not need any DOM (Document Object Model), there is no reason to use HTML. Using JavaScript will not only not simplify your work, but will make your project progress worse. However, mobile apps like Facebook are just a list, and there is nothing beyond the scope of HTML5. Using HTML5 should be easy, so many times large companies do not have much reference value for technology selection.

Well, after explaining that HTML5 is not as weak as people think, you may feel that these components in Amaze UI are not enough to make the product you want, which is one of the reasons why Amaze UI chooses open source - to allow the community to contribute more content. If you are planning to make an HTML5 product now, even if you don't choose the Amaze UI framework, don't let cases like Facebook and LinkedIn become a stumbling block for you.

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