The Chrome folks have put together a Field Guide for Web Applications that is almost as notable for its design as the content itself. The field guide is a short resource with four chapters on Web apps, and one devoted to “Bert Appward” – the fictitious author of the guide.
The guide is laid out as a book, and works as an offline application. For example, you can give the app permission to store itself on your mobile device and read it even if you’re away from a data connection.
Google’s Pete LaPage says that the guide uses AppCache for offline use and the HTML5 History API maintain page state. The entire “app” is a single HTML page.
If you’re just getting started with creating Web applications, this makes a good overview. The guide provides a number of links to resources and tutorials that will help developers with things like using Webfonts, CSS3 keyframe animations, and so on. The guide would also serve as a good executive summary for other folks outside the developer team that might need to learn a bit more about what a Web app should be.
The design of the app is great, and it looks good in Chrome and Mobile Safari. The fonts look a bit fuzzy in Firefox Aurora, though. However, the book design gets a bit old after about five minutes. The information is worthwhile, but slogging through a “book” app gets tiresome.
Despite that, it’s worth checking out if you’re new to creating Web apps or just want to see what Google recommends as best practices. Have any other resources that developers ought to check out? I’d love to hear about them.
