General Web APIs

Elements, events, network requests, storage and other standard Web APIs that provide useful functionality for Open Web Apps. The summary table on our Web API team's main Wiki page also provides a useful overview of what's supported and where.

Network requests - send and receive data with XMLHttpRequest

XMLHttpRequest is the DOM API used to send and receive information using HTTP, including for downloading files.

Battery Status API

Provides information about the system's battery charge level and lets you be notified by events that are sent when the battery level changes.

DOM events

The event reference provides a complete list of all the events that can be sent and received to interact with DOM objects.

Touch events

This documentation covers touch events in particular, which of course you are likely to encounter when developing apps for touchscreen devices.

Online & offline events

Allows your app to dynamically respond to changes in network connection availability.

History

Traverse and manipulate the historical view state of your app with various commands - helpful in rewinding or advancing the user's current view.

Audio

Embedding and manipulation of audio content with the HTML5 audio element.

Video

Embedding and manipulation of video content with the HTML5 video element.

Geolocation

Enables your app to request the user's current location and listen for location changes.

Screen orientation

Listen for high-level screen orientation changes between various portrait and landscape positions.

Device orientation

Allows your app to detect granular device orientation changes from on-device sensors.

IndexedDB

A database access layer for Web apps that provides a scriptable interface for storing and retrieving large sets of data on the user's device.

Storage

The Storage API family provides various way to persistently store limited amounts of simple data on a user's device.

• localStorage
• sessionStorage
• Blob - An object that represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The data contained can be manipulated and mutated into several common formats (images, etc).

Web workers

Allows apps to run JavaScript code (which cannot touch the DOM or window object) in background threads to optimize performance and unblock UI rendering.