HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications

Everybody’s talking about HTML5 all of a sudden. It’s going to revolutionise the Web (apparently) and anyone who is anyone wants a slice of the action. Google supports it. Microsoft is backing it. Adobe’s developing tools for it. But what the heck is it?

Currently HTML5 is still work in progress. In principle it will eventually make web sites inherently interactive with integrated animation, video and drag-and-drop capabilities. If you want to be ahead of the game, this book promises to “show you – not just tell you – what HTML5 can do for your web sites.”

In spite of the “show, not tell” angle, I would have to say that this is far from being a richly visual book. There are, to be true, quite a number of colour screenshots showing things such as styling effects, fonts and video playback inside a browser but, even so, I would not describe this book does a good deal more telling than showing. This is, perhaps, not entirely surprising given the fact that HTML5 is still an evolving standard and support for its features is still only preliminary in web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9.

In fact, this book is really a taste of things to come – it provides an introduction to the fundamental features of HTML5 and explains how it will help to do things such as structure HTML pages for interactive sites such as Blogs, how to design input forms using new features such as data lists and date pickers, how to embed custom fonts using CSS3 and how to make use of new graphics and ‘rich media’ features.

It gives a good overview not only of the broad areas addressed by HTML5 – styling, graphics, video and so on – but also the nitty-gritty details of HTML5 syntax: its new tags and attributes. And it has a useful section on programming your web sites with JavaScript.

It’s still early days in the evolution of HTML5. But Internet technologies have a habit of moving quickly and it now looks likely that HTML5 is soon going to be a significant technology. If you want to find out what it is and what it does (or soon, will do), this book is a good introduction.