Making Sense of HTML5 with SharePoint: Introduction to the Series

 Many of you have heard that there’s something new coming, and that it’s called HTML5. Or maybe that it’s here but you can’t take advantage of it due to the browser you use or because you use SharePoint.

As with most new things these days, there’s way too much information available about HTML5 to sift through. HTML5 is a technology, but it’s also turned into almost a philosophy about “modern” Web development. HTML5, along with the concept of the “modern” Web, is an evolving set of ideas and specifications, so it’s a moving target. The core idea is that with HTML5, we can build lighter, faster, and more interactive Web pages than we could in the past.

This post also appeared at NothingButSharePoint.com on 2012-03-20. Visit the post there to read additional comments.

This is the first article in a series that I am going to do here at EndUserSharePoint. Mark Miller and I have discussed the importance of HTML5 to EndUserSharePoint readers, and a series of articles seems to make a good bit of sense. Digging into HTML5 also seems like a natural extension of what I already do with Data View Web Parts (see my series here called Unlocking the Mysteries of Data View Web Part XSL Tags), jQuery, CSS and SPServices, which allows me and many of you to build so-called “no code” solutions for SharePoint. Dare I still say developing in SharePoint’s Middle Tier?

The series will be primarily for the end user crowd, not hard core techies. By that, I mean that I will attempt to make HTML5 more understandable and accessible to those of you who are on the front lines with SharePoint, solving business problems directly. Of course, developers can and should be users of SharePoint, so the series is bound to have interesting information for them as well.

If you are a hard-core developer, then this series may not be for you. As I mentioned, there’s plenty of information about HTML5 out there, whether it be reading the official W3C spec or some of the many other “official” resources out there. If you’re a developer dying to use HTML5, you’re probably consuming as much of that content as you can find already.

While I plan to get into some cool examples of things you can do with HTML5, the series won’t teach you to be an HTML5 coder. The goal is to help make sense of HTML5 and show some of the cool new things you might think about doing with it. I also hope that by reading the series, you’ll be able to have more productive discussions with the developers who build your solutions. Of course, this is NothingButSharePoint.com, so everything will be in the context of SharePoint.

In the series, I’ll try to answer questions like:

• What is HTML5 and how is it different than what I already know about HTML?
• Should I care about HTML5 now or can I wait a while?
• How do HTML5 concepts fit into what I do on a daily basis with SharePoint?
• What are some of the cool things I can do with HTML5? (Yes, this will get heavy rotation – without cool new ways to solve business problems, what’s the point?)

I’m looking forward to doing the series, and I hope you’ll want to follow along. Of course, it will be far more interesting if you can tell me what you would like to know more about. I’ve already gotten some suggestions on a post on my blog called HTML5 and SharePoint: What Do You Want to Know? . Feel free to leave a comment if there are aspects of HTML5 you’d like to see me write about.