OTOH, I didn’t see many of the reports of groovy new devices at CES saying “and it runs HTML5″, and I am thankful for that.
Really nice work, Mark. I’ve been following your stuff since “Dive Into Accessibility” and your work on HTML5 is as good, if not better for its sheer level of pedantic detail, as anything I’ve read.
Having not browsed you site and therefore having not left footprints or useful preference data :) I’d like to cast a vote for expanding the information on canvas. What I found in the book was enough to convince me that either it was totally useless or that I had somehow miss-understood the subject. My test project was a chess board with movable pieces. No canvas combination made that particularly doable. Great book non the less. Just noticed the partial Mandelbrot set at the bottom— code to draw same on canvas would be useful if only for the classic ‘pretty picture’ effect. Code that allowed diving would be spectacular :)
I can safely say that I bring up the microdata chapter at least once a week. It has fans, and it’s place in reality will exist eventually.
Glad you decided you to present your knowledge free for everybody to use!
— Kalvster 
It’s a beautiful book, you deserve the money. Congratulations.
Can you give browser family breakdowns for the other 94%
IE, 6%
Firefox, ?%
Chrome, ??%
Safari, ??%
Cheers
— Eric
Good wark man, nicely done!
— Crabore Numbnuts
I love the honesty in the wya you write, the underlying Microsoft bashing from a Google employee, but your so honest about it! Well done on your achievement and that for the interesting stats.
— Khyne
And I liked the Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers.
— Eric Tully
Hi Mark, Very impressive site and contents (diveintohtml5.org). Apart from content, I really liked the clean design. Thanks !!
BTW, Where can I find such nice b/w royalty-free images ? Or did you make them yourself ?
Thanks,
— nirakar
Other browser breakdown: Firefox 40%, Chrome 27%, Safari 21%, Opera 4%.
Public domain images came from http://www.openclipart.org/ , mostly http://www.openclipart.org/user-detail/johnny_automatic
— Mark
I think the chapter on canvas is brilliant – it’s been my standard reference for all my experiments. A combination of that and the MDC tutorial (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/canvas_tutorial).
Another fun fact from my diveintohtml5.org analytics: traffic drops by 50% on the weekends. (This is also true of Python and Python 3.)
— Mark
If you want to “find out what the hell is going on” without the “evil” google thing and in the process reappropriate your own data, there’s piwik, it’s an opensource realtime web analytics software from the guys of phpmyvisites fame, it’s worth the try. there an online demo on their website: http://piwik.org/
— ramina
“all the world’s browsers” have disabled web sockets? Pretty sure it’s currently still enabled in Chrome, Safari and iOS Safari 4.2.
Splendid proof that you can live on the bleeding edge (as opposed to one version behind) and still work just fine. I love the site and plan on picking up the book soon. It has been an invaluable resource for me and people I have shared it with.
I bought a copy and reading much of it off the web site first. It is my pleasure to support technology authors. I am sure thats a tough gig.
— Jeff Bendixsen
It was a pleasure reading it as it appeared on the website, and a pleasure reading my ePub copy. I look forward to referring to it for years to come.
Lovely font for your title by the way. It tricked me at first, I thought you had stuck an image of a predigital page for the front. Where did you find Essays 1743? Love the book.
— Enoch
That’s great news!
I did want to point out a few things about your stats:
- Your time on page stats are likely well under the actual figures. As you probably know, Google counts time on page by calculating the difference between two tracking pixel loads. If some of your readers only spent time on the first page they saw and then left (shown as a bounce), it would actually be averaged in as 0 seconds. You might find it neat to sample a little traffic using ClickTale (which constantly hits the tracker) to get a better insight. Plus, it’s kind of cool to see mouse movement, scroll reach, and attention on their heatmaps.
-Since GA is a JavaScript based tracker, your mobile numbers aren’t going to represent browsers that can’t or don’t execute it. Biggest case is BlackBerry, which at least on older phones disabled JS by default.
— Danielle R
After liking a lot Dive into Python, I will have to take a look (some day, as my thesis work is piling up) at this book. Thanks for writing it, and above all, for the free+paid way. It is a brilliant way to go, and I guess that it encourages more buying than anything.
Cheers,
Ruben
Hugh Myers,
My game wouldn’t exist in HTML without Canvas, so I can tell you that it’s not useless. A chess board is orthogonal enough, it would actually be easier using traditional HTML animation techniques, not a canvas. You need a better example.
But when you start wanting to generate graphics dynamically, combining images, and transformations, there’s no substitute for the Canvas. The hero in my game for instance, is a Will-o-Wisp, a barely cohesive blob of randomly moving lights. His parts are in constant motion, even when he’s not. So, my game never draws him exactly the same way twice. That would be terribly difficult without a Canvas.
> Where did you find Essays 1743?
It’s packaged in Debian and Ubuntu.
— Mark
let me ask directly, to be clear.
does the license allow me to
create an e-book of this content
and give it away for free?
-bowerbird
— bowerbird
> does the license allow me to create an e-book of this content and give it away for free?
Yes, as long as you retain my copyright statement, i.e. don’t try to take credit for actually writing it.
It also allows unlimited translations, although for some reason I’ve had more success there with my Python books than with this one.
— Mark
I’m one of those who purchased the digital version of HTML 5 up and running. I thought the price was fair for the job so I paid it. Books are easy to ‘get’ for free if you use sharing webs (i.e. rapidshare) but it is senseless to steal something that saves you lots of hours and headaches. At the end you earn money due to the productivity of your learning so you shouldn’t be afraind of paying a fee.
This is my perspective.
— Pau
thanks for confirming that, mark. :+)
for people who receive the e-book for free,
and who want to pay you for “your cut”,
do you have a way for them to do that?
what amount would you “recommend”?
for instance, how much do you receive
when o’reilly sells a digital copy?
-bowerbird
p.s. i’ll let you address pau, and his
use of the “steal” word, if you want to.
— bowerbird
Absolutely love your work and can’t thank you enough for writing about HTML5 when you did. I’ve been engrossed in it ever since.
Oh, I did not know about that web socket issue.
Congrats, you write great books!
— Montreal Web Design
Perhaps I’m the umptieth to point this out (but I can’t tell) but the new comments do not show up. I only see 4 comments despite frantic refreshing (no proxy).
— P. van Kampen
Great business model giving away free ebooks online and making money from people who request the print. Never knew that would work quite so well. Thanks for sharing.
— Willie
I’m glad it works out well- but are e-ink readers generating or reducing sales? Have you noticed an impact since they started to mainstream? (I’m assuming your readers are likely early adopters)
Your writing is very spoken-wordy, no matter the subject. I think people relate really well to that.
— Ryan
Sir, I commend you on the Peaks & Pokes chart. I remember those well from my youth. Thank you for a smile.
— Michael Kohne