HTML5 at London Web Standards

I was privileged to be invited to come and present at London Web Standards, and honoured that the tickets sold out within 45 minutes of being available. So, no pressure then ...

Assisted by the lovely Henny who advanced my slides and alt-tabbed from slideshow to demo, I sneezed and snuffled my way through a presentation called HTML5 and Friends (PDF, 723K).

The resources that I demoed were

You can also download Opera 10 which I was using to demo.

Opera Developer Network has some beginner's canvas tutorials available:

  1. HTML 5 canvas - the basics
  2. Creating an HTML 5 canvas painting application
  3. Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting
  4. Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting: Part 2

For the second half of the talk, I built an HTML5 page through the magic of live coding (with lavish prizes!).

Consequently there are no slides to publish, but I have an article called Designing a blog with HTML that covers the same ground. (Two articles on my personal blog cover it in much more detail: Redesigning with HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA and Marking up a blog with HTML 5 (part 2).)

The shocking looseness of HTML5's validation rules is discussed in an article I wrote called HTML 5 + XML = XHTML 5. The main take-home should be that, although you can mix quoted or unquoted attributes, upper and lower case freely (even in the same page), you shouldn't: if you do, you'll make your code an unreadable and therefore unmaintainable mess. Choose one coding convention that works for you and stick to it.

Some other useful resources:

Thanks to all who attended and asked great questions. I'm sorry that I had to charge off before the bar shut (not like me at all!) but my son was sick so I needed to get the last train home.