The many places to Dive into HTML5

HTML5 Doctor - Dive into HTML5… on HTML5 Doctor

Last week, we were surprised and saddened when Mark Pilgrim, long time educator, raconteur, and writer of note, decided to retire from the internet. Unfortunately, he also decided to 410: gone all of his writing, including Dive into HTML5.

Mark provided this book for free on the web (under a Creative Commons By 3.0 license), in addition to a published, for-sale version entitled HTML5: Up and Running from O’Reilly. This is a very unusual setup, but one we’ve collectively benefitted from. Many HTML5 Doctor articles feature links to this book, and the sudden loss of this valuable resource was a little shocking.

The interwebs soon mobilised, however, and now there are several copies of this book, including:

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We doctors feel the same way and plan to help keep the book updated. To that end, we’ve set up a mirror at diveinto.html5doctor.com, and we’ll be experimenting with using GitHub to contribute.

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Because sometimes I like my web offline (weird, I know... ;) this PDF version caught my eye.

Mislav's blog - Dive into HTML5: In memory of Mark Pilgrim

"Mark Pilgrim is gone and with him all of his sites and work.

I more than enjoyed his book “Dive into HTML5”. It was a bible of transitioning and progressive enhancement back when nobody was certain about the direction of HTML working groups and browser support. It helped me learn about the semantics of new elements, playing video without Flash, local storage, offline apps, manipulating browser history, and more. It helped me appreciate feature-detection with JavaScript instead of browser sniffing. It encouraged me to stop worrying and just go forward with all this exciting new stuff.

Mark Pilgrim left, but this book still lives on. Unfortunately, now there’s no official resource where people can go to read the book online or download it in PDF format. There are many mirrors of the official site and some PDFs circulating the Web, but they are hideous. They don’t contain original typefaces, the cross-references aren’t clickable, page breaks are in unfortunate places, etc.

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Today, I’m republishing Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5. I’ve also created a beautiful PDF eBook from it:

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The eBook has an embedded table of contents, working cross-references, well-placed page breaks and tons of others tiny tweaks and enhancements. It looks great on iPad. I hope you will enjoy it on your device, too.

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Here's a snap of the PDF;

Is it lame to say I didn't know about this resource? Anyway, while the original author has moved on, it's cool to see the community pick it up and drive on with it...