by Alan Millar
Grab your popcorn, throw your dog a bone, adjust the lighting -- and otherwise prepare yourself for the briefest yet deepest of briefs on HTML5 and CSS3 and what it means to all of us in the WWW. In books one and two from A Book Apart, Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm put on a clinic about how HTML and CSS were dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. But before we go any farther, let us ascertain who you are and why are you reading this post, much less considering a deep-dive below the photic zone of markup and style?
I need to know if you really care WTF is the WHATWG? Do you lay awake at night replaying your carefully crafted argument for (or against) significant whitespace? Are you doing back-flips of joy because you may now wrap other elements inside a single a element?
So you’re moving from presentational to semantic markup but you haven’t found a way past the nuanced (and perhaps elitist?) comparison of b and strong, between i and em, and why big went obsolete while small survives. Before you even consider perusing the content of any web page do you nervously eye-track : ^ ? to your web developer toolbar to pre-verify that this hobo HTML has even validated???
If you answered yes, yes, yes to ANY of these questions, then the help you desperately need is at hand. So GET YOUR GEEK ON and read these books. Before I call your momma!
In HTML5 for Web Designers, Jeremy Keith begins with a wee tale on the fuss that led up to HTML5 (Chapters 1 & 2). He flies through the Rich Media markup of Canvas, Audio and Video in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is the whatup on Web Forms. Chapter 5 is nothing much…(unless your idea of game on is the semantic web that everyone keeps Yammering about). Finally, Mr. Keith lettuce-wraps it up with a down-to-earth review of things you can actually do today in HTML5 without smoking your browsers.
CSS3 for Web Designers is by Dan Cederholm. Now hold on, because this guy is really, really into space travel. And I’m guessing wine. And definitely design with a capital Dribbble. But without doubt Dan is best known for his uncanny command of stylesheets, the lingua franca of the presentation layer. He is pretty funny too, with handcrafted topics like “Navigating the Moon”, “Hover-crafting”, and ‘The Disappearing Gnome” sprinkled throughout his book like extra butterscotch on a jam donut. Sit up and take note CSS design intern and let it be learned that ingrained in this briefest of tomes Mr. Cederholm dispenses sage advice not just on how, but also on when one should...</spoileralert>.