Chapter 1. Introducing HTML5 Games

Hypertext Markup Language, HTML, has been shaping the Internet in the last few decades. It defines how content is structured in the Web and the linkage between related pages. HTML has kept evolving from version 2 to HTML 4, and later to XHTML 1.1. Thanks to the web applications and social networking applications, it the era of HTML5 now.

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) defines how web pages are presented visually. It styles all HTML elements and the styles of their states, such as hover and active.

JavaScript is the logic controller of a web page. It makes the web page dynamic and provides client-side interaction between the page and users. It accesses the HTML through Document Object Model (DOM). It controls the new HTML features via their APIs.

There are modern web browsers in most desktop and mobile devices. These latest web techniques bring us the new game market—the HTML5 games. With the new power from these techniques, we can design games with HTML5 elements, CSS3 properties, and JavaScript to play in most browsers and mobile devices.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Discovering new features in HTML5
• Discussing what makes us so excited around HTML5 and CSS3
• Previewing what games we are going to build in later chapters
• Preparing the development environment

So, let's get started.