Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: The Web Evolved

by Christopher Murphy

Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 is your introduction to the new features and elements of HTML5―as a web developer you'll learn about all the leaner, cleaner, and more efficient code available now with HTML5, along with some new tools that will allow you to create more meaningful and richer content. For everyone involved in web design, this book also introduces the new structural integrity and styling flexibility of CSS 3―which means better-looking pages and smarter content in your website projects. For all forward-looking web professionals who want to start enjoying and deploying the new HTML5 and CSS3 features right away, this book provides you with an in-depth look at the new capabilities―including audio and video―that are new to web standards. You’ll learn about the new HTML5 structural sections, plus HTML5 and CSS3 layouts. You’ll also discover why some people think HTML5 is going to be a Flash killer, when you see how to create transitions and animations with these new technologies. So get ahead in your web development through the practical, step-by-step approaches offered to you in Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 .

Genres: Programming, Web, Computers

644 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

A writer, designer and educator based in Belfast, Christopher Murphy runs the Masters in Multidisciplinary Design at the University of Ulster, where he has championed an entrepreneurship focused curriculum for many years.

He is the author of a number of books and maintains a design consultancy, where he has worked for a variety of clients including The Royal Mail, Absolut Vodka and Queen's University, Belfast. An internationally respected digital artist, he was described by Creative Review as, "a William Morris for the digital age."

Christopher writes about design, standards and tweed at Web Standardistas.

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I could find for idiot programmers like myself who want to understand Web 2.0 technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. It is replete with excellent sample code and exercises. Still relevant today!

[Costin Manda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 is a strange enough book. It is not a book for beginners, as the title would have you believe, but only something that gives you a taste of new HTML and CSS features. Some of the things discussed are not very thorough, but may be very detailed (like when they talk about a hard to spot bug for a specific browser version). They talk very little of some often used features, but very in detail about something that will probably not be used by many people, like data annotation.

What is immediately obvious, though, is that the authors are professionals with a lot of experience. They see things and think about them in a way that a person with no design experience like myself has never thought about. Their explanations are backed by a lot of links and downloadable code, so it can be used like a reference. I would say that about a third of the book relates to HTML and the last two are about CSS. Awesome and weird things are being discussed, from custom fonts to 3D transforms, from data annotation of any HTML so that is machine parseable (like Google crawlers and such) to pagination control for layouts that need to look like books or be used in e-readers. It is also a modern book, the type that lets you know about various features, but instead of rehashing a subject, they give you a link to more information from someone else.

You can get example code from the book's site, as well as see the table of contents and details about the authors. What immediately jumps into mind is that the page is HTML5 and uses CSS3, but is not nearly as carefully crafted, data annotated or awesome as they advise in the book, which validates a little my view of the book: an interesting book to read about features you will probably rarely use. It certainly made me experiment some with my blog and think of ways of implementing many of the features, but in the end nobody wants something very over the top, so only small changes were made.

[Stephen Rynkiewicz]

"Beginning" is a misnomer: You'll have to be fairly skilled in HTML to benefit from this book. Since I learned HTML5 on the fly, I'm going back to understand the semantics in the current spec and wean myself from <div>, the basic container element. There's more to this than knowing the difference between <b> and <strong>: It lets you structure more machine-readable, search-friendly, accessible pages. The structure is well thought out (though the index is sketchy) and gets hands-on quickly with sample code exercises.

[Heather Larcombe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed + lots of outside references. I was not the target audience and probably should have put it down after the first 'homework assignment' was "mark this up however you would normally -- HTML 4 or whatever." Um. Yeah. But I persevered and learned a lot regardless of starting from a more n00b frame of reference than the authors were intending to address.

[Bartek · Rating 4 out of 5]

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