You can use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in conjunction with other web content technologies to deploy cross-platform media-rich interactive content to a variety of sources. HTML documents—which can be anything from a textual product description to a photo library to an interactive form—can be read by web browsers on every common platform, displayed and interacted with on portable digital devices, and integrated into WebKit-based applications in Mac OS X, along with a variety of other technologies.
This document details every HTML tag and property supported by WebKit and Safari on all platforms, which include Mac OS X, iPhone OS, and Windows. You should read this if you are developing web content that will be displayed in Safari or within a WebKit-based application.
The following articles describe key aspects of Safari's HTML support:
“Explanation of Terms” explains terminology used in this reference.
“Supported HTML” describes all the HTML elements supported by Safari. This includes standard tags (as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C), common tags that are not part of a standard, and Apple extensions.
“Supported Attributes” describes the HTML attributes supported by Safari.
“Supported Input Values” describes supported types for the input tag.
“Supported Meta Tags” describes additional keys for the meta tag.
“Supported Accessibility Roles” describes supported accessibility roles defined in the WAI-ARIA specification.
There are a variety of other resources for Safari web content developers in the ADC Reference Library.
If you are designing web content for Safari on iPhone, then you should also read:
iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Applications provides user interface guidelines for designing webpages and web applications for Safari on iPhone.
Apple URL Scheme Reference describes how to use the Phone, Mail, Text, YouTube, iTunes, and Maps applications from your webpages.
If you want to learn more about what Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) properties are supported in Safari, then read:
Safari CSS Reference describes the CSS properties supported by different Safari and WebKit applications.
If you are using JavaScript and want access to the DOM or use the canvas object, then read:
WebKit DOM Programming Topics describes how to use JavaScript in web content for WebKit-based applications.
WebKit DOM Reference describes the API for accessing the WebKit's Document Object Model.
If you are developing web content for Safari on the desktop and iPhone OS, then you should read:
Safari User Guide for Web Developers describes how to use the Debug menu in Safari.
Dashcode User Guide describes how to use Dashcode to create web applications.
To learn more about other web technologies available on Mac OS X that you can use to create your web applications, read Getting Started with Internet and Web.
If you want to learn more about WebKit or contribute to the open source project, then go to The WebKit Open Source Project.
If you want to read the WebKit W3C proposals then go to: http://www.webkit.org/specs.
Last updated: 2009-11-17
