Jennifer Kyrnin - Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 Mobile Application Development in 24 Hours

Jennifer Kyrnin

800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46240 USA

Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 Mobile Application Development in 24 Hours

Copyright 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33440-5
ISBN-10: 0-672-33440-2

Editor-in-Chief

Mark Taub

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Development Editor

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Managing Editor

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Project Editors

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Proofreader

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Technical Editors

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Publishing Coordinator

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Cover Designer

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Compositor

Nonie Ratcliff

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Kyrnin, Jennifer.
Sams teach yourself HTML5 mobile application development in 24 hours / Jennifer Kyrnin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-672-33440-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. HTML (Document markup language) 2. Mobile computingProgramming. 3. Application
softwareDevelopment. I. Title.
QA76.76.H94K97 2012
006.74dc23
2011036380

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: November 2012

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The web is changing very quickly these days. New browser versions are being released every few months rather than every few years, and new devices are entering the marketplace all the time. For a web developer, staying up to date on the latest trends and technology is important, and the trending technology right now is HTML5.

In fact, some news outlets are claiming that HTML5 and mobile applications are two of the fastest-growing areas of job creation. According to HTML5 and mobile applications are where the jobs are, and this book can help you learn all about HTML5 and the application programming interfaces (APIs) that relate to it. After 24 hours, you will be able to build complex web applications and convert them into native mobile applications.

This book covers more than HTML tags and attributes. Although these things are the basis of the HTML5 specification, when people talk about HTML5 they often include many other programming interfaces that are not strictly part of the HTML5 specification, like geolocation or the History API. This book covers the basics of HTML5 and how it has changed from previous versions of HTML. It also introduces you to some of the technologies that are lumped in with HTML5, including:

Drawing with the canvas element

Adding streaming media with the video and audio elements

Editing pages online and checking spelling

Using drag-and-drop functions on web applications

Building more user-friendly forms

Creating semantic divisions with new elements, such as article, section, and nav

This book covers several other specifications beyond HTML5, including:

Web Open Font Format (WOFF) web fonts

Microformats and Microdata

WebSockets

Web Workers

Files API

Web Storage

Offline Web Applications API

History API

Geolocation

HTML used to be used primarily in web browsers on computers, but now, with the advent of smartphones and tablet computers, more people are accessing web pages on mobile devices.

Every hour of this book provides examples of how the lessons contents apply both to web browsers and mobile devices and shows you techniques for getting your applications to look better on mobile devices.

With this book, you will learn how to create applications that work on the most popular mobile smartphones and tablets out there: Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices). Screenshots from both Android and iOS devices appear throughout as well as tips and warnings about how the different devices perform.

This book is divided into 24 lessons. Each lesson covers a specific topic related to HTML5 or an API that is part of the Open Web Standard. Each lesson takes about an hour to complete.

This book is divided into three sections:

, teaches you the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and teaches you how to build a basic web application for mobile and non-mobile devices. After reading this section, you will know how to build a basic website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

, covers some of the more important new features of HTML5. You will learn more about new HTML5 elements to help you build better applications.

, describes some of the more useful APIs and tools for mobile application development and goes into detail about how to create mobile applications.

Code samples are written in mono font within the text of the book, while blocks of code will be called out separately, for example:

This is a block
Of code

Some code examples that are too long to display as one line in the book use the symbol to indicate that these lines should be all on one line, like this:

This book has three types of sidebars: