HTML5 Hacks

Chapter 10. Pro HTML5 Application Hacks with Node.js

Up to this point, this book has provided a sample collection of hacks that cover a large portion of the HTML5 feature suite. But what about building professional HTML5 applications?

As you can see in the latter chapters of the book, some of the HTML5 specifications are advancing the technologies at the connectivity layer. In order to begin creating hacks that examine those specifications, we need to employ a web server. We also want to be able to write our markup quickly and deploy our changes easily. The Node.js tool set makes these concepts simple and easy to learn. Node.js is also written in JavaScript, so we can use the same programming language in both the browsers and the server.

It is certainly arguable that other programming languages and web frameworks, such as PHP and Ruby on Rails, provide similar environments, but for the purposes of creating “quick and dirty” hacks to exercise new HTML5 APIs, there is no better choice than Node.js.

The hacks in this chapter will guide you all the way through to having an HTML5 boilerplate starter app that can be easily deployed to a remote server. If you so desire, you can even skip ahead to the final hack and download a starter kit for building professional HTML5 applications in Node.js.

HTML5 Application Design Considerations

In addition to providing hacks that teach you the basics of using these cutting-edge tools, this chapter will also touch on some of the most common modern ...