The HTML5Rocks site may be slanted toward Google’s implementation of HTML5 (and works best in Google’s Chrome browser). But it’s an impressive compendium of demos and how-to’s for everything HTML5, from 2- and 3d animations, to instant text columns, to building databases in the browser (“Web Storage”), to drag-and-drop with a single line of code. Web designers, prepare for HTML5 to rock your world.
Sure, HTML5 includes some cheezy effects reminiscent of Internet Explorer’s early proprietary tags from the 1990s (do we really want to make it that easy for everyone to add gradients and drop shadows to their home page?). And Flash still rules the world of interactive animation online.
But HTML5 works on the newest mobile devices, skirting Apple’s prohibition on Flash (and skirting the App Store approval process at the same time). As soon as developers begin to create or extend free HTML5 frameworks like YUI and JQuery, a lot of designers are going to think twice about Flash’s $500 pricetag.
Here are some of the juicy new features demo’d at HTML5Rocks:
JS APIs (new JavaScript methods)
- Client Side Storage (Web SQL Database, App Cache, Web Storage)
- Communication (Web Sockets, Worker Workers)
- Desktop experience (Notifications, Drag and Drop API)
- Geolocation
HTML
- Semantics (New tags, Link Relations, Microdata)
- Accessibility (ARIA roles)
- Web Forms 2.0 (Input Fields)
- Multimedia (Audio Tag, Video Tag)
- 2D and 3D drawing (Canvas, WebGL, SVG)
CSS
- Typography
- Visuals
- Transitions, transforms and animations