The Essential Guide to HTML5

Gain a deep, practical knowledge of the basic tools used for webpages: hypertext markup language (HTML5), cascading style sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. This updated version includes new and improved games and interactive applications, and will serve total beginners as well as people with some programming language experience, but who are not familiar with the combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This book illustrates technical features and programming concepts in actual use. Examples include familiar games such as Rock-Paper-Scissors, Craps, Memory (aka Concentration), Blackjack, and constructing and playing with mazes. To show what we mean by “actual use”, the chapter on mazes demonstrates try and catch, split and join, local storage and radio buttons to encode, save, access, and decode the information defining a maze. Other projects include a basic word guessing game, ballistic games (Cannonball and Slingshot), a quiz requiring users to put items in order, and demonstrations of animation by displaying a ball, photo, and video clip bouncing in a rectangle.

The Appendix contains examples of advanced techniques such as Scalar Vector Graphics programs displaying the HTML5 Logo and a cartoon figure, each of which can be changed dynamically, and mathematical techniques for calculating if a move crosses a line and re-adjusting an arrangement of circles and arrows. Each example in the chapters and the Appendix includes screenshots and tables revealing the structure of the program and-statement-by-statement explanations of code.

The book also contains suggestions for using the concepts and techniques to build your own programs. If you follow through with your own ideas, you will develop solid programming skills for building websites and for learning other programming languages, including the next version of HTML and current and future JavaScript frameworks, libraries, and tool.