HTML5 and CSS3

I know most web designers and developers panic about HTML5 and CSS3. Before saying anything about it: don’t worry, jQuery Mobile will make everything for you. Therefore, you don’t need to know HTML5 or CSS3 to work with this framework. I encourage you to learn them regardless. You will be able to accomplish much more knowing these new standards, but that is for a later discussion.

This book is not intended to teach you HTML5 or CSS3, but it is important to understand some things about them. Many mobile browsers, mainly inside smartphones and tablets, support HTML5, CSS3, and other APIs.

I can talk for hours about HTML5, including its history and what it has to offer to the mobile space.

HTML5 in hard terms is an evolving standard that includes changes to the HTML markup and lot of new APIs in JavaScript (yes, HTML5 is a lot about JavaScript APIs). HTML5 in a more casual term is an umbrella for many modern features inside browsers, including the W3C’s formal HTML5 standard, other W3C APIs, CSS3, and nonstandard extensions. You can check http://mobilehtml5.org for compatibility information for HTML5 in mobile browsers.

jQuery Mobile uses many of HTML5 features to provide a great and fast experience on mobile browsers. That does not mean that the browser needs to support HTML5 as a whole. In fact, many old browsers still support some HTML5 markup even without knowing its existence. jQuery Mobile uses CSS3 a lot, when possible, for animations, gradients, effects, and UI rendering.

To further arouse your curiosity, with HTML5, CSS3, and other modern techniques, you can provide, with or without a jQuery Mobile experience, the following features:

  • Offline access

  • Offline storage

  • Web sockets

  • Geolocation access

  • Accelerometer and gyroscope support

  • Animations

  • 2D and 3D transformations

  • Gradients and visual effects

  • Viewport management (for zooming support inside the browser)

  • Webapp installation metadata

  • Integration with native applications

  • Multimedia support

  • Graphic drawing (vector and bitmap)

  • Custom font support

There are several samples and links regarding these features on my blog, http://www.mobilexweb.com/.

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