Head First HTML5 Programming

Appendix A. Leftovers: The Top Ten Topics (We Didn’t Cover)

We’ve covered a lot of ground, and you’re almost finished with this book. We’ll miss you, but before we let you go, we wouldn’t feel right about sending you out into the world without a little more preparation. We can’t possibly fit everything you’ll need to know into this relatively small chapter. Actually, we did originally include everything you need to know about HTML5 (not already covered by the other chapters), by reducing the type point size to .00004. It all fit, but nobody could read it. So, we threw most of it away, and kept the best bits for this Top Ten appendix.

This really is the end of the book. Except for the index, of course (a must-read!).

#1 Modernizr

One thing you’ve probably noticed in this book, is that when you want to detect browser support for an API, there is no uniform way of doing so; in fact, almost every API is detected in a different way. For geolocation, for instance, we look for the geolocation object as a property of the navigator object, while for web storage we check to see if localStorage is defined in the window object, and for video we check to see if we can create a video element in DOM, and so on. Surely there’s a better way?

Modernizr is an open source JavaScript library that provides a ...