To a web developer, three months on the Web is like a year in real time. And that means it’s been twelve web years since the last edition of this book.
We web developers are always hearing about something new. A few years ago, HTML5 and CSS3 seemed so far off, but companies are using these technologies in their work today because browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer are implementing pieces of the specifications. HTML5 and CSS3 help lay the groundwork for solid, interactive web applications.
They let us build sites that are simpler to develop, easier to maintain, and more user-friendly. HTML5 has elements for defining site structure and embedding content, which means we don’t have to resort to extra attributes, markup, or plug-ins.
CSS3 provides advanced selectors, graphical enhancements, and better font support that makes our sites more visually appealing without using font image-replacement techniques, complex JavaScript, or graphics tools.
Better accessibility support will improve dynamic JavaScript client-side applications for people with disabilities, and offline support lets us start building working applications that don’t need an Internet connection.
In this book, we’ll get hands-on with HTML5 and CSS3 so you can see how to use them in your projects, even if your users don’t have browsers that can support all of these features yet. Before we get started, let’s take a second to talk about HTML5 and buzzwords.
Each chapter in this book focuses on a specific group of problems that we can solve with HTML5 and CSS3. Each chapter has an overview and a list summarizing the tags, features, or concepts covered in the chapter.
The main content of each chapter is broken into tips, which introduce you to a specific concept and walk you through building a simple example using the concept.
The chapters in this book are grouped topically. Rather than group things into an HTML5 part and a CSS3 part, it made more sense to group them based on the problems they solve.
You’ll find some chapters that specifically focus on CSS3, and you’ll find CSS3 goodness sprinkled throughout other chapters.
Many tips contain a section called “Falling Back,” which shows you methods for addressing users whose browsers don’t directly support the feature we’re implementing. We’ll be using a variety of techniques to make these fallbacks work, from third-party libraries to our own JavaScript and jQuery solutions.
Each chapter wraps up with a section called “The Future,” where we discuss how the concept can be applied as it becomes more widely adopted. We’ll start off with a brief overview of HTML5 and CSS3 and take a look at some of the new structural tags you can use to describe your page content.
Then we’ll work with forms, and you’ll get a chance to use some form fields and features, such as autofocus and placeholders. From there, you’ll get to play with CSS3’s new selectors so you can learn how to apply styles to elements without adding extra markup to your content. Then we’ll explore HTML5’s audio and video support, and you’ll learn how to use the canvas to draw shapes.
You’ll also see how to use CSS3’s shadows,
gradients, and transformations, as well as how to work with fonts, transitions,
and animations.
