HTML5 Web Application Development By Example Beginner’s guide

Book Preface

The time to start using HTML5 is now. HTML5 provides a complete application development framework for writing full featured applications that run in the web browser. Even though the HTML5 specification hasn’t been fully completed yet, the most popular features are already widely supported by nearly every modern browser running on devices, from desktops to tablets to smartphones. That means you can write an application once and have it run on nearly any device.

If you are looking to start writing HTML5 web applications but don’t know where to start, then this book is for you. We will start with the basics of building a web application and then learn about HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript by building real working applications. This is not a reference book. We will keep the theory to a minimum and hands-on coding to a maximum.

Just a few years ago, writing full-featured applications in the browser required other
technologies such as Flash or Java Applets that ran as browser plugins. Like most people, I had only used JavaScript to write simple client validation scripts. I didn’t even think it was possible to write real applications using JavaScript. That all started to change when a couple of things happened.

Firstly, I discovered jQuery. Here was a library that made writing JavaScript a whole lot easier by abstracting away browser idiosyncrasies and making it very easy to manipulate the elements of a web page. Plus it could help us perform some cool actions, such as animating elements. Then about three years ago I found out about HTML5 while looking for a way to draw graphics primitives directly onto a web page. Since then I’ve watched HTML5 develop into a complete framework, capable of being used to write real applications without plugins.

This book is the culmination of those past three years of writing JavaScript nearly every day, learning what works and what doesn’t. A technical brain dump, if you will. The objective was to write the book that I would have liked to read when I started out. The future of HTML5 web application development looks bright. All of the big hitters in the world of web browser development are putting their full support behind HTML5 and JavaScript. HTML5 is the future of web application development!