Table Of ContentUnraveling HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
with Visual Studio 2013
By István Novák
Copyright © 2014 by István Novák
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Author.
Disclaimer: The Author makes no representations or warranties with respect to the
accuracy or completeness of the content of this work and specifically disclaims all
warranties, including without the limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose.
To Henriett, Eszter and Reka, who supported me in writing this
book with their love and appreciation
Table of Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Whom This Book Is For
What You Need to Use This Book
What This Book Covers
Conventions
Chapter 1: A Short Tour of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Creating a Basic HTML Page
Formatting the HTML Page
Using Inline Styles
Using an Embedded Style Sheet
Moving Styles into a Separate File
Defining Visual Behavior with CSS
Adding Actions to the Web Page with JavaScript
Leveraging Page Inspector
Using jQuery
Debugging JavaScript
Summary
Chapter 2: Getting to Know HTML5
The Unordinary Story of HTML5
What Behind the Term HTML5 Is
HTML5 Markup Basics
Using HTML <head>
Defining HTML Content
A Few Tricks to Edit HTML Markup with Visual Studio 2013
Enriching Web Pages with Headings, Lists, Links, and Images
Summary
Chapter 3: Achieving Richer User Experience with HTML
Old Style: The Omnipotent <div>
Structure and Semantics
Tables
Using Multimedia
Summary
Chapter 4: Forms and Controls
Web Forms Basics
Using Controls to Build Web Forms
Sending and Processing Form Data
More Controls
Form Validation
Summary
Chapter 5: A Few More Things about HTML
Other HTML Elements
Refining Markup Details
Painting the Canvas
Facing with the Past and Future of HTML5
HTML5 Tools
Summary
Chapter 6: Exploring the Document Object Model
DOM Basics
What the DOM Covers
Navigating in the Document Tree
Changing the Document Tree
Global Attributes and Events
Using the DOM with jQuery
Summary
Chapter 7: Getting to Know JavaScript
A Couple of JavaScript Peculiarities
Placing JavaScript in HTML
JavaScript Syntax Basics
Variables, Types, and Scopes
The Boolean Type
The Number Type
The String Type
The Date Type
The Object Type
The Array Type
Operators
Flow-Control Statements
Summary
Chapter 8: Advanced JavaScript Programming
The JavaScript Object Notation
Functions
Programming with Objects
The Browser Object Model
Error Handling
Summary
Chapter 9: Getting to Know Cascading Style Sheets
Styles and Style Sheets
Selectors
Style Properties
The Cascading Order
Media-Dependent Style Sheets
Summary
Chapter 10: Basic Style Patterns
Text Formatting
The Box Model
Using Background Images
Styling Tables
Styling Tips for Forms
Summary
About the Author
Istvan Novak is an associate and the chief technology consultant of SoftwArt, a small
Hungarian IT consulting company. He works as a software architect and community
evangelist. In the last 20 years, he participated in more than 50 enterprise software
development projects. In 2002, he co-authored the first Hungarian book about .NET
development. In 2007, he was awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
(MVP) title, and in 2011 he became a Microsoft Regional Director. As the main author, he
contributed in writing the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Six-In-One book (Wiley, 2010),
and in Beginning Windows 8 Application Development (Wiley, 2012). He is the main
author of Beginning Visual Studio LightSwitch Development book (Wiley, 2011). István
holds master’s degree from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary, and also has a
doctoral degree in software technology. He lives in Dunakeszi, Hungary, with his wife and
two teenage daughters. He is a passionate scuba diver. You may have a good chance of
meeting him underwater at the Red Sea in any season of the year.
Introduction
It is incredible how web development has evolved in the last couple of years! While about
five or six years ago most web pages were penurious compared to native desktop or
mobile applications, nowadays many new sites provide competitive user experience—
moreover, desktop applications started to copy the style of web apps.
Even for web developers, it is a real challenge to cope with the flood of new technologies,
libraries, and tools. HTML5, CCS3, jQuery, AngularJS, Ember, Bootstrap, Knockout,
MVVM, LESS, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, and many more are all here to help
creating web UI with great productivity and high-value user experiences. PHP, ASP.NET,
Google Web Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Python, and a great number of other
technologies empower developers to create fast and scalable back-ends for web sites.
Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other competitors
offer you cloud services to deploy your applications to.
How in this fast-turning world can a developer from the old school keep up with the
youngsters who were breastfed with web programming? How can developers exiled to the
server side for a while undertake the challenge of getting acquainted with these new
technology racehorses?
Getting all the knowledge to catch up with what’s going on nowadays is not easy at all.
As an experienced C# programmer and enterprise architect, I found myself in a strange
situation after 20 years of experience. Even if I worked on project teams that implemented
big systems including satellite web sites, I was dropped behind those team members who
started their professional life pretty close to new generation—neat, asynchronous,
dynamic, etc.—web page development. It took months to find the right way to be able to
communicate with them, and find the common language with them. During these months I
read many books, blog posts, articles, and went through many small programming
exercises to get into the picture.
Well, I decided to create a series of booklets using my experiences—to help you cope with
similar situations.
