Review: HTML5 for Web Designers
While it went on sale back in May, A List Apart‘s first publication, HTML5 for Web Designers, only just began shipping. I have been eagerly awaiting my copy and it just arrived. I’m not normally compelled to write reviews of technical books I read, mainly because I don’t read them all at once and they usually just lie around my apartment as an every-so-often technical resource (when Google turns up nothing). This book is different. It reads like much less of a verbose white paper — or HTML5 specification rather — and more like a refreshing one-sitter.
What to Expect
This book is not a one-stop shop for all your HTML5-related needs. It’s an introductory resource aimed at showing you a snippet of the new functionality contained within HTML5 and the reasoning behind it with a dabble of example code. Not much more than that. It scratches the surface — enough for you to know what you want to use to do something in your next project and point you in the right direction with how to get started and research more. That being said I was a little disappointed upon flipping through the pages of the book when it arrived. I wanted to see sections about things like geolocation, drag and drop, Web Storage, Web SQL Database, Web Workers, WebSockets and so on.
Instead I was greeted with this quote in the book:
The [JavaScript] APIs in HTML5 are very powerful. They are also completely over my head. I’ll leave it to developers smarter than me to write about them. The APIs deserve their own separate book.
Fair enough. Those are rather technical subjects and this is an introductory book. I can live with that. In fact, the first chapters of the the book cleared up many misconceptions about what the HTML5 spec actually encompasses. Many people lump things together in the HTML5 buzzword. Web Storage isn’t even in the HTML5 spec, but I had to read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML 5 to learn that nugget:
[Web Storage] was at one time part of the HTML5 specification proper, but was split out onto its own specification for uninteresting political reasons.
Author Jeremy Keith, whose DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax books have been in my arsenal for several years, sets out to explain some of the more landmark structure and feature changes in HTML5 while keeping the book far from a boring technical read:
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