HTML5

Interested in HTML5? Want a change to play around with the latest and greatest in web app development? This workshop is for you! We'll cover feature detection, web forms, the new HTML elements, take a spin around the canvas, and we'll finish up with offline/local storage and web sockets.

Detecting 101 Before you can take advantage of a new HTML5 feature, you have to make sure a given browser can support it. This section will cover the basics of detection as well as getting the most out of rocking cool libraries like Modernizer. We'll also look at just what to do when a browser doesn't support a feature you're trying to leverage.

New elements Along with a new human type-able doctype, HTML5 introduces several new semantic elements. Recognizing that nearly every website in existence has a header, a footer and some navigation divs, HTML5 gives us a header, a footer and a nav element along with a few others. HTML5 seeks to pave cowpaths, not force the web to bend to its ways...

Canvas One of the most exciting features of HTML5 is the canvas, a space you can use to draw anything from shapes to text to, well, anything! From basic drawing to graphs to full fledged games, canvas opens up a whole new world of possibility, a world sans browser plugins.

Local Storage Web apps are, in many cases, indistinguishable from their thick client brethren, at least if you're not on an airplane. OK, so many planes have wifi, but there are parts of the world that don't have reliable Internet connections! Thanks to local storage and the offline API, all is not lost - you can create a web app that works offline.

Web sockets and web workers Ajax is like so many things in the web world - a simple (but very powerful) hack that isn't defined by a spec. With the advent of the web socket API, we'll finally have a native way to have bi-directional communication with the server. As we create richer and richer clients, we're writing more and more JavaScript. While the JS engines are getting faster and faster, there are cases where it'd be very handy to run scripts in the background. Web workers give us just such an opportunity.