HTML5 for Designers (book review)
I just finished reading “HTML5 for Designers”, a book published by A Book Apart and written by Jeremy Keith. The idea of the book is to represent the features and all the new stuff in HTML5 in a short and understandable way. As NetTuts+ wrote in their review “HTML5 for Web Designers is supposed to be a super-condensed, easy-reading version of the HTML5 spec” and that’s what it is. To understand the book you need basic knowledge of HTML, because the point of the book is to represent the new features in a shorter way than the specification. You wont learn HTML with this book.
The book is divided in six chapters:
- A Brief History of Markup
- The Design of HTML5
- Rich Media
- Web Forms 2.0
- Semantics
- Using HTML5 Today
At the beginning Jeremy Keith talks about the history of markup language, the path from HTML 2.0 to HTML5. He explains the differences between HTML and XHTML, what the XHTML 2.0 would have been and much more interesting stuff that you may not know. Everything is nicely written so it’s easy to read and understand.
The next part is about the philosophy of HTML5, why the new stuff makes sense like the new doctype. How with HTML5 unlike XHTML everything is allowed (uppercase, lowercase, self-closing or not) everything is entirely up to you. Also there are no more deprecated elements, only obsolete.
The chapter of Rich media explains the new exiting additions like canvas, audio and video. I wont cover the whole book, but reading it was very enjoyable and informative. The most of the information can be found free of charge all around the internet so if can’t buy it now, don’t get upset. If you can, go and read it.
