Book Review: Html5 For Web Designers

[Saint_Michael 3]

In this review, I will be talking about a book, though almost a couple of years old, provides a interesting insight or rather how far HTML5 has come since this book came out. Titled "HTML5 For Web Designers" was written by Jeremy Keith in which he talks about HTML5 and what is about to come and or available and while most of what is in this book is old news by now. This book gives a small idea on how complicated HTML5 has become and I will say this good luck if this is your first language.

The interesting part about this book is that it only comes in at roughly 90 pages and yet completely opens your eyes, heck it did for me when Keith talk about the <header> and <footer> tags because they no longer represent their original intentions. Meaning that when it comes to those two tags, they no longer belong at the top and bottom of the website, but rather they can represent the top and bottom of the content of itself. Best way to describe their new usage is by looking at a blog article in which the <header> tag now represents the name of the article, the generated link to the article, who wrote it, and of course when it was published. As for the <footer> tag, the copyright information still applies but you can expand it by including your sources, other links maybe some info on the author themselves.

While you could produce the same results with div tags, the problem is though you can only use those two tags once, however, the <header> and <footer> tags can be used a 1000 times and your website will still come out producing valid code. Thus the power of HTML5, of course Keith talks about other topics, such as new ways to deal with audio and video, the <div> killer article and section tags, and even how HTML5 is slowly replacing flash and JavaScript,

Granted the drawback to this book is its shortness, but this book is more of a fun read then technical, but I wouldn't have minded if he covered more in each chapter, but alas that is what those other books are for. However, if you check out the abooksapart.com website, this is just one of a series of books that are talking about the latest generation of design, development and concepts of web design, so go check them out after reading this book.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Good review! I think anyone who's serious about web design needs to start getting into learning HTML5 because it's "the way of the future." You can do many things in it that used to only be available via flash (videos/charts) and since it's all native code, it runs significantly faster.Though, I'll admit, at 85 pages I have doubts as to how thorough the book here truly is. That just seems pretty short unless it's just a "learn the new things and changes" book and not a full overview.