Yeah, HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t 100% ready yet, nor standard, and may not be for a while…but since when did waiting around in this industry do you any good?
At any rate, one of the better primers on HTML5 right now looks to be HTML5rocks.com. And be sure and check out their slide presentation on the new features.
In anticipation of doing more JavaScript development, I went back to look at the state of my editors on hand. BBEdit was always a favorite for quick-and-dirty text editing, and has a very simple interface with some good, basic tools for, say, quickly throwing together a table or other assortment of HTML tags…but it was lacking for serious development.
A while back, I upgraded to Coda. I really love the interface, and it has nice built-in tools for FTP and SVN. But I want robust JavaScript functionality, and while the code completion is satisfactory (aside from some minor built-in typos), JQuery support isn’t what I was looking for.
I had given Aptana Studio a quick look as a helper for building AIR with JavaScript. But I recently gave it a full test drive as a JavaScript editor and I really love it. The code hinting and auto complete is great, JQuery support (as well as the support for other frameworks) via easily installed plugins is fantastic. There’s also debugging, robust HTML/CSS code assist, live preview, aq DOM outline view, and FTP. What’s more is, having built a ton of ActionScript applications with Flex/Flash Builder, the Eclipse-style interface is very familiar to me, even though it’s more cluttered than Coda.
Not to mention: it’s open source! Check it out.
InsideRIA has a tutorial that walks through using a tool called Aptana Studio for rolling HTML & JQuery into AIR applications.
A List Apart has this article about using MVC to maintain your JavaScript projects that are big enough to get a little nuts. For those of us who have done mostly client-side, user experience construction, MVC seems like a good concept to become familiar with as you dive into more proper “development.”