Dive Into HTML5

A free technical book on HTML5 written by Mark Pilgrim, a programmer whose reputation rests as much on the quality of his prose as on his code. Each chapter opens with historical context — the origins of the doctype, the politics of codec wars, the archaeology of character encoding — before explaining the technical specification, making it simultaneously a reference manual and a history of the web platform. Pilgrim's earlier Dive Into Python followed the same method and became one of the most widely read programming books of the 2000s. The HTML5 edition is notable for the author's subsequent disappearance from the internet in 2011, when he deleted all his online presence without explanation, turning the book into something of a time capsule of a particular moment in web culture. Free online.