Archive for August, 2010

I started playing with html5 and wanted to share some good resources I’ve found for anyone trying to get up to speed on the specs, browser support and code samples.

For a very detailed overview of everything html5 is (and isn’t) head over to diveintohtml5.org. The section entitled “What does it all mean?” is a great reference for all of the new elements, what they mean and how to use them. The site also has quite a lot of information on browser support, history of the working standard and all of new technologies html5 offers.

If you want to jump straight into some code html5reset.org gives you three different zip files to download. A barebones template, “the kitchen sink” template and the kitchen sink with very useful comments. I recommend grabbing the kitchen sink with comments, reading through the code and comments and then making your own template from scratch. Don’t be tempted to include the entire kitchen sink in your code – remember that less is more! Nonetheless, it’s a great reference to learn from and should get you up and running with html5 quickly. It’s also a great spotlight on some of the great scripts available to support html5 elements in older browsers, such as hosted versions of John Resig’s "HTML5 Shiv", The Modernizr script and Dean Edwards’ IE7/8/9 scripts.

If that’s too much reading for you to understand what browsers are supporting html5 today, jump on over to The Web Design Checklist for an excellent chart reference on browser compatibility. Just keep in mind that not seeing your site’s most popular browser in the compatible list doesn’t mean you can’t start using html5 today. There are lots of graceful degradation tricks and scripts out there (as mentioned in the above resources) that can get you looking forward to the future of the web.

Honorable mention goes to Coding A HTML 5 Layout From Scratch By Enrique Ramirez on Smashing Magazine for a quick barebones html5 layout.

I plan on writing an another article on html5 once I get a little farther with what I’m working on but wanted to share a few of the resources I’m using myself to get started. (Hopefully) more coming soon.