Table of Contents for

HTML5 Geolocation

This book is intended for developers interested in using the W3C Geolocation API in their web applications. The first few chapters delve into what geolocation is, its history, and how it is currently being utilized today.

These first chapters of the book are a crash course in geolocation to provide a framework for understanding what the API is about. If you are already in the GIS industry and just want to know how to implement this new Application Programming Interface (API) in your applications, or already know all there is to know about geolocation, then skip ahead to Chapter 3 to see the API in action.

Developers should be particularly interested in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, as they discuss the API with code and examples on usage. Hopefully even nonprogrammers will be able to follow along in these chapters and gain a better understanding of what the API does. Chapter 6 ties things up by exploring what the future of geolocation holds for us all, and discusses practical applications for development using the Geolocation API.

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

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First, a special thanks to my wife, Sarah, for not only taking care of things while I was busy writing (especially managing the kids), but also for putting on your editing hat and taking a red pen to the first draft of the book. I know you made this book more readable with your amazing writing skills. I am glad to have written something you were interested in reading!

I want to thank the reviewers who gave me suggestions, comments, and corrections; you made this a better book and I really appreciate it. Brian Dunn and John Jackson—thank you.

Also a big thank you to my editor, Simon St.Laurent, who not only continues to give me opportunities to write on topics I care about, but is also a great editor and a pleasure to work with. Thank you for having the confidence in me to allow me to put pen to paper once again for O’Reilly Media.

Finally, I want to thank everyone else who helped make this book happen. Thanks to O’Reilly Production Services for proofreading this work and to Adam Zaremba for all of the last minute production edits. To Karen, thank you for my cover animal. Thank you David for getting the book layout the way it needed to be. And Robert, thank you for interpreting my hand-drawn figures and creating the great illustrations that you did.

I am honored to have created a book about geolocation for the Web, and found it a pleasure to write, difficult though it was at times. I hope you enjoy it!