So I picked up HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith (and the “A Book Apart” crowd) when it first came out, but being life and full time work, I have just gotten around to it, so thought I would give my overall impressions of the book.

Markup for Web Designers

In Chapter 1,we get a brief history of markup and how HTML5 came to be – at first I thought this may be a waste of a chapter (hey I have been using markup forever) but I actually learned a few things, so I appreciated the transition into Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the philosophy in the building of HTML5, most notably backwards compatibility, as well as basic changes from what came before.

Chapter 3 kind of the meat and potatoes of the book and my favorite bits, as the book describes some of the rich media elements introduced in HTML5. The big ones every web designer is drooling over -  audio and video. When these are fully implemented by all browsers the life of every web designer will be magically better. Really.

I “Kind Of” Really Understand It Now

The area I found confusing about HTML5 are some of the new structural elements, such as section, article, and aside. Because nobody can really tell me what makes up each of these “areas”. For example, what constitutes an article, and what constitutes a section? The author addresses these basic building blocks in Chapter 5, “Semantics”. It seems these are kind of confusing to the author too, because they are so open to interpretation.

As the author states: “What’s more problematic is that article and section are so very similar. All that separates them is the word “self-contained.“…it’s a matter of interpretation.”

Since there are no real rules (really, they aren’t in cement) he doesn’t try to provide them, but he does give very good explanations on them and some of his interpretations of them. I really appreciated this part and his insight.

The last chapter is kind of the “go out and do” part, explaining how you can start using HTML5 today and how simple or bold you want to be in trying it out. It also provides a good list of resources for further learning on the subject.

One of the reasons I was so excited about this book and series (other than the subject) is that I have been dabbling in HTML5 and until very recently (like this week) my sources such as Lynda.com didn’t offer anything on HTML5 yet. I am a pretty visual learner so I appreciate that. But I wanted a good source, and something short and sweet that I could immediately wrap my hands and head around. This book is that, and I can not only recommend the fast read, but it is one I will keep and thumb through again as I make my way down the HTML5 road.