A few weeks ago one of my developer friends was gushing about the capabilities of his favorite native platform. After every point I felt obliged to point out that the web platform either already had or was actively developing precisely the same capabilities—and then some. He was incredulous. "Prove it," he said.

So I pulled together a few of my favorite examples from the cutting edge of the web platform and recorded three screencasts to help my friend—and others—meet the web platform again for the first time.

The first video, Building on Foundations, goes over how the web platform has been fixing various historical shortcomings and building upon its core strengths, like complicated graphical effects, composability, and advanced text layout.

The next video, Learning from Other Platforms, reviews how the web platform offers new capabilities inspired by successes on other platforms with things like push notifications, payment APIs, and web intents.

Because HTML5 and its related technologies cover so much ground, it can be a real challenge to get up to speed on them. That’s why today we're sharing HTML5 Rocks, a great new resource for developers and teams looking to put HTML5 to use today, including more information on specific features and when to use them in your apps.

We're launching the site with nine tutorials on specific HTML5 features. For example, you can learn how to successfully take your application offline, access the user's location with Geolocation, and even read local files from within JavaScript. In the site, we’ve also included a number of APIs that are defined outside the W3C HTML5 Spec, but kept them within this site as next-generation web applications span many specs. Watch the site as we’ll soon be adding more guides.

The Interactive Presentation, written in HTML5, demonstrates a number of features with examples you can toy with. You can use this presentation to learn more about HTML5, but also to conduct presentations with your team. Feel free to share it; all the content here is licensed Creative Commons Attribution.

The code playground lets you take working examples and edit them live, so you can get a feel for how the browser reacts to these APIs. And after you’ve hacked with, for example, the Notifications API, you can explore handpicked resources that include reference guides, development tools, and other community sites.