Foreword

In June 2004, representatives from the semantic web community, major browser vendors, and the W3C met in San Jose, California to discuss the standards body's response to the rise of web applications. At the end of the second day, a vote was held to decide whether the W3C should augment HTML and the DOM to address the new requirements of web applications. Minutes from the event record the anonymous and curious result, “8 for, 14 against.”

This schism lead to a divergence in effort: two days later, the WHATWG was formed from the major browser vendors to solve emerging issues. Meanwhile, the W3C pushed forward with the XHTML2 specification, only to drop it five years later to focus on an aligned HTML5 effort with the WHATWG.

Now, seven years since, we stand to benefit greatly from the passionate minds that have designed HTML5. The features both codify de facto standards that have been in use for years and lay the groundwork for next-generation web applications. Putting them to use means a more engaging and responsive web experience for your users and, oftentimes, far less code for you.

In this book, you'll find a well-designed learning curve bringing you up to speed on the features within HTML5 and its associated specifications. You'll learn best practices of feature detection, appropriate use cases, and a lot of the whys that you won't find in the specifications. The code examples are not plain, trivial uses of each API but instead lead you through building actual web applications. I hope this book is able to serve you well, and I hope you'll be as excited about the next generation of the web as I am.

Paul Irish
Google Chrome Developer Advocate,
Modernizr & HTML5 Boilerplate Developer