It’s no secret Microsoft is going all-in on dual-screen devices. So far, the company has talked a lot about developing dual-screen experiences for Android, and it’s today talking about dual-screen experiences on Windows 10X.
But what about the web? This week, Microsoft is officially sharing its plans for bringing the benefits of dual-screen devices to the web.
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The company is revealing how it plans to allow developers to build web apps that take full advantage of dual-screen devices. Microsoft is proposing a new JavaScript API and a CSS media query that will enable web developers to take better advantage of all the upcoming dual-screen devices.
Microsoft’s proposed system will make it easier for developers to adapt their websites to wider-screens UI patterns, and adapt to these new types of dual-screen devices without making significant changes to their existing website design. “The web platform does not yet provide the necessary primitives for building layouts that are optimized for foldable experiences. Developers may be able to solve this by taking a hard dependency on a specific device hardware parameters – an approach that is fragile, not scalable, and requires work duplication for each new device,” the proposal reads.
The company plans to contribute its implementation for these new APIs to Chromium. Microsoft is also adding the ability to remotely debug dual-screen devices from Microsoft Edge on their desktop.
Microsoft has detailed its proposal on GitHub here, where you can find out more about the technical details for these new APIs.