HTML5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 11. Communicating with the Web Server

When you started your journey with HTML5, you began with its markup-based features (like semantic elements, web forms, and video). But as you progressed through this book, you slowly shifted your focus to web page programming, and the JavaScript-powered parts of HTML5. Now, you’re about to dip your toe into a few HTML5 features that take web page programming to the next level. They not only require JavaScript code but also some server-side code—code that runs on the web server, in whatever server-side programming language you want to use.

Adding a server-side language to the mix poses a bit of a problem. On one hand, it doesn’t matter what server-side programming language you pick, as long as it can work with pure HTML5 pages (and they all can). On the other hand, there’s not much point in getting knee-deep learning a technology that you don’t plan to use or that your web host doesn’t support. And there’s no shortage of good choices for server-side programming, including PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, Java, Python, and many more.

This chapter tackles the problem by using a small amount of very simple server-side code. It’s just enough to round out each example and to let you test the HTML5 part of the equation (that’s the JavaScript code in the web page). In your websites, you’ll change and extend this server-side code, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and which server-side language you prefer.

So what are these features that require ...