It should be noted that Pilgrim can at times seem a little pro-Google. They are his employer but I would appreciate it if he was an equal opportunity humorist and didn't pick on just the others.

Chapter six gives a short introduction to the geolocation features and the API provided by HTML5. It explains how to use gears or geo.js to work around IE's lack of support and also explains how to opt out of this sort of service — as it might seem a little too much for some people. I guess this is a feature for advertisers (not like they aren't doing it already anyway).

Chapter seven briefly covers local storage in HTML5 and the precursors to it (cookies). It's got a few code snippets you can tinker with. There's a great meme embedded in this chapter: 'userData allows web pages to store up to 64 KB of data per domain, in a hierarchical XML-based structure. (Trusted domains, such as intranet sites, can store 10 times that amount. And hey, 640 KB ought to be enough for anybody.)' The chapter covers on competing visions and notes that this is a separate effort from the core elements of HTML5. At the end Pilgrim adds persistence to the halma game from earlier. This is already being abused by the way.

Chapter eight shows how to markup your pages so that they operate offline. You include resources in the cache manifest file to let the browser know what to cache for offline usage (and more importantly what not to cache). Again, at the end of this chapter, we take the halma game offline.

Chapter nine is one of the better chapters as it extensively covers the various new types of form inputs we have in HTML5. Gone are the days of importing calendar scripts to create a date popup widget (although we already know how to check if that's required). Search inputs, different kinds of integer selectors and color pickers are all covered in this chapter. While you might have experienced this in many other UI technologies, we're finally receiving native support in the browser!

The final chapter is very lengthy (relatively) and very informative. It explains microdata and how to make HTML5 extensible so you can define your own markup (while keeping it normal so that older browsers don't plotz). It's like advanced metadata. You might wonder: Why would you do this? Well, the chapter continually shows how Google search results interpret this data ... but we aren't informed of any competitors using it or any plans of them using it. Pilgrim informs us that we should put this around or data and let others decide what to do with it (they might surprise you). So while the work is pretty extensive, you won't immediately see the fruits of your labors (unless everyone else is already doing it).

HTML5 has a long way to go. I hope this book is a living document and I imagine the final O'Reilly book on HTML5 will be several times the length of Up and Running but until those who ship their code cement it (after reading this book, my money's on Google) we'll have to wait. In the meantime, Pilgrim has some great resources on his site and done a decent job with this book.

You can find the book on Amazon or various electronic formats on the publisher's site. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
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