An Introduction
HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 from the W3C. Fantastic summary of the stuff that HTML5 will eventually bring to the table. Take it with a grain of salt though… because as you’ll see, there isn’t a whole lot you can use right now, cross-browser, without hacks.
I mentioned the Misunderstanding Markup comic already, but definitely worth a read if you are still confused as to which markup syntax to employ.
Questions? Check the WHATWG HTML5 FAQ.
Keeping up with the Spec
Comparison of layout engines (HTML 5) on Wikipedia. As you can see, Internet Explorer doesn’t provide a whole lot of support for HTML5 features.
The spec itself is definitely worth a read. Or use the WHATWG version (it’s split into multiple pages, and updated more regularly). Obviously the most comprehensive source you’ll find.
Current Uses
HTML5 Doctor has some articles on things that are mostly cross-browser, and more or less safe to use now, like Native Drag and Drop and “Block-level” links. Unfortunately I can’t recommend utilizing much more of the tips on the HTML5 Doctor site, because they either rely on hacks, or could change as the HTML5 standard changes.
I can’t recommend using the new semantic elements from HTML5 yet, but it can’t hurt to begin preparing for HTML5 with semantic class names. If nothing else, you’ll be ready when the new elements become safe to use.
We Can Dream…
Automatic form validation? Yes please.
You can do really cool things with the canvas element apparently.
Web workers + video + canvas = pretty freaking cool.
Yes, that’s right, you can use the HTML5 Doctype (<!DOCTYPE html>) now, if you want to. It’s certainly not necessary, but there’s several good arguments for implementing it sooner rather than later, and not many arguments against it. First things first, check out the incredibly insightful Misunderstanding Markup comic written by Jeremy Keith. Jeremy explains the differences between XHTML 1 and 2, and HTML, and boils down the “which doctype to use” argument to personal preference. So what are the reasons, if any, not to use HTML5?
I haven’t used CSS Sprites a lot in the past, but when I finally started to, the benefits were immediately visible. I won’t go into detail about how to use this technique as it’s been covered in detail. I will, however, try to elaborate on just how much of a benefit CSS Sprites can offer.
In a previous post I mentioned that I would revisit cross-domain AJAX calls to measure the helpfulness of JavaScript frameworks like DOMAssistant and Prototype. In this post I’ll use DOMAssistant to perform the same basic tests I did previously, while evaluating the potential increase in efficiency.
Recently I was tasked with creating a form that allowed the user to specify a color selection from a limited number of options. There are numerous scripts that display a popup color selection on the web, but I needed one that was limited to just a few colors. So I wrote a script that makes all text inputs in a form with the class name of “color” display a simple color selection box. Here’s what it looks like in action: