HTML5 For Web Designers By Jeremy Keith

When the buzz about HTML5 started to spread, my first thought was, "Dang it!" This reaction was not a reflection of the technology itself; rather, it was a frustration that a technology I had previously thought of as, "being in the bag," was now evolving and required further exploration. In an industry that is growing so rapidly, it was comforting to think that one of the major technologies in use - HTML - was static. This allowed me to allocate my efforts elsewhere, furthering my understanding of things like ColdFusion, Javascript, and CSS. But, all of this has now changed; or, has it?

I believe that much of my frustrating with HTML5 can be attributed to a lack of understanding. What is HTML5? How much has changed? Can I use it yet? What is core? What is vendor-specific? What about IE6? With all of these questions floating around in my head, the idea of learning HTML5 seemed somewhat overwhelming. But, not anymore; last night, I read HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith - the first book from, "A Book Apart," the literary side of, "A List Apart."

At 86 pages long, HTML5 For Web Designers lives up to the Book Apart slogan: Brief books for people who make websites. I'm a slow reader and it took me about two hours to get from cover to cover. In the book, Jeremy Keith describes the roadmap of HTML and provides a good overview of the tag-based side of HTML5 (he explicitly leaves the Javascript APIs to those developers more versed in the individual technologies).

Not only does the book quickly and efficiently cover what's new (and what's "obsolete") in HTML5, it acts as a sanity check - a re-grounding in reality; it takes this amorphous technology and codifies it, transforming it from a daunting task into an exciting opportunity. It's very comforting to know that HTML5 wasn't the beast that I perhaps thought it was.

If I had one complaint about the book, it was that it didn't really outline any "best practices." Of course, it might be too early for any HTML5 best practices to exist. Even the author echoes this sentiment to some degree:

What's more problematic is that Article and Section are so very similar. All that separates them is the word "self-contained." Deciding which element to use would be easy if there were some hard and fast rules. Instead, it's a matter of interpretation. You can have multiple articles within a section, you can multiple sections within an article, you can nest sections within sections and articles within articles. It's up to you to decide which element is the most semantically appropriate in any given situation. (Page 68)

Much to his credit, however, Jeremy does go on to iterate through a Section example and how one can use "The Outline Algorithm" in order to ensure that content organization remains meaningful. What would have really brought the concept home, however, would have been a screen shot of a web site with the various elements outlined and labelled with their appropriate HTML5 tags (ie. Header, HGroup, Section, Article, etc.).

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. Much like Cody Lindley's "jQuery Enlightenment" eBook, it definitely hit the sweet spot of brevity and clarity. It made me much more comfortable with the idea of HTML5 and left me feeling excited to embrace it rather than overwhelmed at the thought of having to learn it.

Enjoyed This? You Might Also Enjoy Reading:

Looking For A New Job?

100% of job board revenue is donated to Kiva. Loans that change lives — Find out more »