HTML5 is booming. One of the main reasons more and more articles about this subject are popping up on the web, is because more and more webbrowsers are supporting it. Even the most feared browser by webdevelopers "Internet Explorer" is making huge progress to make IE9 HTML5 ready. The demo's Microsoft created tell us enough already.

But what exactly is HTML5? This subject is way too big to place into one blog article, but I'm trying to handle several aspects of the subject in several posts. For today, we'll take a look at one of the new features of HTML5 called microdata. I'll explain what it is, and why you should start using it.

I assume you don't want to read any further, if you can't start using this HTML5 microdata right now. Lucky for you, microdata is one of the features that you can start using today already! Browsers that don't (fully) support HTML5 will completely ignore the microdata. For those who completely love SEO: Search engines will absolutely love microdata.

More and more HTML5 tutorials are popping up on the internet. Although it still is future talk, it's still great to see what this upcoming web standard can do for us.

One of the most interesting new HTML5 elements, has to be <canvas>. This element allows the developer to draw anything using JavaScript. I've never played around with this element, but still wanted to experiment with it.

Therefor, I re-created Lights Off, one of the first native games for the iPhone, but now using HTML5 <canvas>.

I know my attempt to create the game isn't nearly as great as the real app, but the goal for this tutorial is to see how the <canvas> element works. That said, this demo only works on browsers that support the element.

  

Can you solve the puzzle? Simply click on a light panel to toggle it along with the four adjacent lights. Or dive into the code and learn some more about the <canvas> element.

Navigation is one of the things you'll see on every website. I wanted to give this part a little bit extra life, and when I saw a movie yesterday that included slot machines, it suddenly hit me. Using jQuery and some basic CSS and HTML, we could add some sweet slot machine style animation to a normally boring kind of navigation. So, for today, we'll be creating a slot machine style navigation that you could use on your website.

Since it's not such an advanced technique, this is also a jQuery quickie. These relatively simple tutorials will also give you a good understanding of jQuery. Simply check out the demo or download the source to see what we're going to make.

  

Already wondering how it works? Check out how you can create this slot machine yourself. Of course, this could easily be transported to be used with social media buttons (instead of the main navigation of your site).

Time for another relatively simple jQuery tutorial, just like my previous jQuery quickie. At work, I'm currently working with Silverlight and implemented unlimited scroll. This is a great technique that could be used on loads of websites. Instead of the regular pagination, where the user has to click to see the next page, unlimited scroll automatically loads the next page when the user is at the bottom.

I wanted to take this technique and port it to another jQuery example. So the quickie for today is Unlimited scroll using jQuery. I've using the Twitter API to make the example, so you'll learn a little bit about JSON too.

Simply check out the demo to see the first tweets from my Twitter stream. Scroll down to load more tweets and see the unlimited scroll in action.

  

Of course, you can use this same technique for something else instead of loading tweets, for example for loading next blog posts etc. Now, let's take a look at how you can create this Twitter example.

Today, we're going to do a relatively simple jQuery tutorial. Rating systems are used a lot on websites, for example to rate how good a certain product, article or comment is. I slightly wanted to improve this idea, by making it more visually attractive.

By using the jQuery Color plugin, we can animate colours. Simply use the animate() function from jQuery to have colours fade to another colour. When using this technique, combined with some CSS3 feautures (rounded corners and drop shadow), we can create a Colourful rating system.

As usual, since CSS3 isn't supported (yet) by every browser, the demo page only fully works on those browsers that support it (Firefox, Safari and Chrome). Other browsers will not see the circles, but will see colourful blocks that can be used as a rating system.

  

Should I do more jQuery "basic"/quickies in the future? Simply let me know and I'll do that! For now, let's see how you can create your own colourful rating system with jQuery and CSS3.