from Hacker News

Google to use HTML5 in Gmail

by Grauwolf on 6/28/10, 5:40 PM with 12 comments

• by IChrisI on 6/28/10, 8:53 PM

  > HTML5 will also help in building new features. One feature that the Gmail design team is now working on is the ability to drag files from the desktop into the browser.

  Working on? I've been using this for the past few months, ever since I heard about it. One time I wanted to send an attachment on a machine without Firefox or Chrome. I didn't bother, because it would have taken too long for the value it would have added to the email.

• by ecoffey on 6/28/10, 6:24 PM

  "If the browser supports CSS3, Gmail will render the pages using these specifications, rather than its traditional approach of using the Document Object Model (DOM)."

  Better go build a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP as well!

• by nwjsmith on 6/28/10, 6:42 PM

  What do they mean by rendering in CSS3 instead of the DOM?

• by ronnoch on 6/28/10, 9:29 PM

  >Currently, the Gmail program is comprised of 443,000 lines of JavaScript, with 978,000 lines if comments are included.

  Interesting - more comments than actual code (535,000 lines vs 443,000 lines).

• by treyp on 6/28/10, 7:48 PM

  It's great that they're using HTML5 for their purposes, but unfortunately they still rank among the worst for supporting HTML in the actual emails. http://www.email-standards.org/

  You can't even include background images in GMail.

• by kunjaan on 6/28/10, 7:26 PM

  Why doesn't Google use GWT to write Gmail or any other applications? And how the hell does it maintain that many lines of JavaScript Code.