HTML5 for Publishers

Introduction

HTML5 is revolutionizing the Web, and now it’s coming to your ebook reader! In this book, I give an overview of three areas of HTML5 that offer great promise to ebook publishers looking to expand beyond traditional text-and-graphic narratives: Canvas, Geolocation, and Audio/Video. After a brief tutorial of the HTML markup and JavaScript code used to implement these features, I transition into some examples that put HTML5 in action:

• A graphing calculator to display algebraic equations on the Canvas

• A children’s finger-painting application for drawing pictures on the page

• A geolocated work of fiction customized with details about the reader’s current location

• An audio-enabled glossary that lets you click to hear the pronunciation of each term

• Embedded video content within instructional text to supplement a lesson

• An interactive MathML quadratic equation solver

• An SVG-based coloring book

All code for the examples is available for download from GitHub. You can also demo the examples right in your browser by going to http://examples.oreilly.com/0636920022473.

For each topic area, I also discuss the current status of HTML5 compatibility with major EPUB reader platforms (for example, iBooks, NOOK Color/Tablet, Adobe Digital Editions). At the present time, support for HTML5/EPUB 3 is limited, and often quite experimental. But with the release of the EPUB 3 specification in Fall 2011, HTML5 officially became a part of the EPUB standard, and slowly but surely, support for EPUB 3 and HTML5 ...