New HTML Tricks for Web Developers in Apple’s iOS

Apple’s recent iOS 6 update added some nice new web standards support to Mobile Safari, the default iOS web browser for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Apple’s documentation remains sparse and occasionally outdated, but luckily Max Firtman, author of O’Reilly’s Programming the Mobile Web, has a very thorough rundown of everything that’s new in iOS for web developers.

By far the biggest news is support for file uploads and camera access using a combination of the File API and the HTML Media Capture API. To let users take a picture from your web app, you’d use a file input tag something like this:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="camera">

Mobile Safari’s Media Capture support is incomplete so it will ignore the capture attribute, as well as any value for accept other than image or video, but at least web apps can now capture and upload images from the iPhone’s camera.

Demos:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="camera">

<input type="file" accept="video/*" capture="camcorder">

<input type="file" accept="audio/*" capture="microphone">

Good work.