We’ve already had a glimpse at Server-Sent Events (also known as EventSource, and I’ll switch between the two to keep you on your toes) in my Methods of Communication article from last year. In this article, I want to delve in to more detail about the SSE API, demonstrate its features, and even show you how to polyfill browsers that lack EventSource support.

Until recently, we developers couldn’t to do much with the state and history of the browser. We could check the number of items in the history and push users forwards and backwards, but this provides little benefit to the user. With the rise of more dynamic web pages, we need more control. Thankfully, HTML5 gives [...]

This post is about the Web Storage API. Technically it’s been shifted out of the HTML5 specification and can now be found in it’s very own dedicated spec. But if it counts at all – it used to be part of the Web Applications spec.

The Geolocation API provides a method to locate the user’s exact (more or less – see below) position. This is useful in a number of ways ranging from providing a user with location specific information to providing route navigation.

HTML5 introduces new methods for enabling a web site or web application to function without a network connection. When you’re working on a mobile connection and your signal drops, or you just have no connection to the internet for whatever reason, having some level of access is better than nothing. In this article, we’ll look at how the application cache can store resources to be used by the browser when it’s offline, granting your users partial access to your web site or application.

By now, you've surely realised that 'HTML5' is so much more than just markup. There's also an army of associated JavaScript APIs. Among the ranks are a few new technologies that open up how we communicate between client and server and across documents. Let's take a look.

You’ve already learned about the <video> and <canvas> elements, but did you know that they were designed to be used together? In fact, the two elements are absolutely wondrous when you combine them together. I’m going to show off a few super-simple demos using the two elements together, which should help suggest cool future projects for you fellow web authors.

This is a bit of a special Simplequiz this week. Simon Pieters, who works on multimedia QA for Opera and is one of those working on the HTML5 spec, asked us to run a quiz that would help the spec writers decide on a new aspect of the language.

If the video element is the poster boy of HTML5, then canvas is definitely Danny Zuko. The canvas element is (still) part of the HTML5 specification, but the 2D drawing API has been moved into a separate document (in case you go looking and can’t find it).

The Web SQL database API isn’t actually part of the HTML5 specification, but it is part of the suite of specifications that allows us developers to build fully fledged web applications, so it was about time we dug around and checked out the deal.