User Interaction and the HTML5 APIs

Abstract

Included in the HTML5 specification is documentation on how HTML elements, as well as the wider web browser environment, can be accessed from a programmed script. This is a component of the specification that is interwoven throughout the specification. Each component that can be scripted is broken into application programming interfaces (APIs) that define how the script can interface with specific elements on the page and specific aspects of the web browser. Some of these APIs are included as part of HTML5, such as the History API for manipulating the browser’s forward and back buttons programmatically, while others are part of associated technologies and are covered in separate (but interlinked) specifications to HTML5, such as the geolocation API—which provides web pages with geographic location-aware capabilities. What these APIs are built around is the idea that the page and its environment are represented by a series of objects, such as the geolocation object, which contains location data for the page. In the context of just the page’s content, these objects form the means by which a web page’s Document Object Model (DOM) may be traversed, as discussed in Chapter 1.