Up to this point, this book has provided a sample collection of hacks that cover a large portion of the HTML5 feature suite. But what about building professional HTML5 applications?

As you can see in the latter chapters of the book, some of the HTML5 specifications are advancing the technologies at the connectivity layer. In order to begin creating hacks that examine those specifications, we need to employ a web server. We also want to be able to write our markup quickly and deploy our changes easily. The Node.js tool set makes these concepts simple and easy to learn. Node.js is also written in JavaScript, so we can use the same programming language in both the browsers and the server.