I recently unearthed a review copy of a book that somehow got lost in the shuffle a couple of years ago, HTML5 and CSS3: Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today by Brian P. Hogan, which is too bad, since it’s one of the better books I’ve seen on the subject. It’s a comprehensive primer on the changes in HTML5 and CSS3. I enjoyed reading through the book after I unburied it last week.
It features a chapter on logically marking up page structure with the new semantic tags (header, nav, section, article, etc.), which explains the contexts they should be used in with a hands-on example of restructuring a blog without excessive divs. A lot of online tutorials make the error of suggesting the aside element for a blog sidebar, which the book helpfully points out as wrong. The section element is the proper tag for the job, as it denotes an arbitrary section of the page, whereas aside is for broken-out sections of your article content, such as pullquotes or diagrams.
From there the author moves on to some CSS3 tricks using newly-added selectors. He shows some simple methods to add zebra-striping to tables with pseudo-classes and add visible URLs to links via a print stylesheet with :after. There’s a brief section demonstrating media queries, as well some on the new JavaScript APIs—localStorage and history pushState, for example. There’s even a bit on using cache manifests to set up offline access.
Oh, and the deprecations. HTML5 deprecates a good many tags and attributes. There is a section listing those, as well as some modern alternatives, such as opening links in new windows without the deprecated target attribute. It can be done cleanly and semantically by using JavaScript, without impacting the user’s ability to middle-click a link and open a new tab…which far too many sites still do today. If you do that, you need to read this book just for that reason.
