Category: HTML5

Review: Head First Mobile Web

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Head First Mobile Web (Brain-Friendly Guides) by Lyza Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby is from O’Reilly (2012). I confess I got a little excited reading this book, which I haven’t done in a long time with a book I intended to review. The excitement came from the fact that I was learning so much.

Generally, I review books about topics I have some experience and expertise in–mostly HTML and CSS with a few general web categories thrown in. I may learn new things, but I’m mostly looking at what’s covered, how it’s handled, how clear the writing is, how clear the examples are, the overall tone of the writing, and the order in which information is delivered.

But I know little about building for the mobile web as a first (and perhaps only) step in creating a web site or app. Hence, excitement.

If you’ve never used a Head First book before, be prepared for different. There are a lot of images, jokes, exercises, quizzes, reminders, and other techniques you don’t normally see in technical writing. Head First books are written this way because of learning research into how best to help you, the reader, remember and use what you read. As you read, you are expected to work along with the text. Downloadable files are provided to help you put together the mobile web sites discussed in the examples. Here are the topics in the table of contents:

  1. Responsive web design
  2. Mobile first responsive web design
  3. A separate mobile website
  4. Device support
  5. Device databases and classes
  6. Frameworks for mobile (the book example uses jQuery Mobile)
  7. Progressive enhancement, offline mode, and geolocation. This is a very good chapter–the explanation of cache manifests is excellent.
  8. Hybrid mobile apps with PhoneGap
  9. Being future friendly
  10. Appendices include setting up a web server environment, installing WURFL and installing the Android SDK.

In going through these chapters you actually build more than one web site–a responsive one using media queries, a business oriented site with password sign in, and a mobile site with user input and offline uses. There is plenty of discussion about problems, pitfalls and ways to work around them.

I think you could get the information you need to get started building for the mobile web from this book and don’t hesitate to recommend it as a text.

Summary: Good hands-on experience while learning.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of Head First Mobile Web (rating: 5 stars)

Useful links: Updated Accessible Presentations, HTML5, Mobile, Intellectual Property

How to Make Presentations Accessible to All from the W3C has just been updated. You can offer help and feedback here.

HTML5 Accessibility: aria-hidden and role=”presentation” from John Foliot.

Why Mobile Matters is a bit of a preview of Luke Wroblewski’s book Mobile First.  It offers convincing reasons why we should be thinking first about mobile design.

HTML5 Adds a New Translate Attribute. A new attribute to learn about.

Pinterest and the Intellectual Property Conundrum is a post of mine that looks at Pinterest, intellectual property law, fair use, implied consent, SOPA, PIPA and efforts from the community around Pinterest to make the site more copyright friendly.

Browser Support for new HTML5 Structural Elements

The new structural elements in HTML5 include section, article, aside, hgroup, header, footer, nav, figure, figcaption, time, and mark.

First, let’s look at support in Internet Explorer. Starting in version 9 of IE, there is support for all the new elements. Versions prior to that provided no support, not even partial.

Other browsers have been supporting these elements for some time. Firefox support extends back to version 6. Firefox is currently at version 9. Chrome, now at version 16, has supported these HTML5 elements since version 13. Safari provided partial support before version 5. Full support began in version 5. Safari’s current version is 5.1. As for Opera, partial support began in version 11, full support in 11.1. Opera is currently at 11.6.

On the mobile side, iOS has supported everything since iOS4. iOS is currently at version 5. Even iOS3 had partial support. Opera Mini is providing partial support in the current version 6. However, Opera Mobile has offered full support since version 11.0. Opera Mobile is currently at 11.5. Android versions 2.2 and above, including the current 2.3/3.0, have full support.

When only partial support is provided, you can use CSS to declare a display:block rule for all the new elements and workaround the problem.

Check out HTML5 Please for information about current support (and workarounds) for everything in HTML5.

Useful links: Video, Access U, WordPress widgets

Video for Everybody! “Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element, falling back to Flash automatically without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone / iPad (don’t support Flash) and on many browsers and platforms.”

A Knowbility conference is coming up on the West Coast. It’s Access U @ CSUN, toward the end of February. Learn from accessibility experts such as Shawn Henry, Jennison Asuncion, Denis Boudreau, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone and others.

An excellent presentation from Kathy Gill on using widgets in WordPress.

Review: HTML5 and CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide

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HTML5 & CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide (7th Edition) by Elizabeth Castro and Bruce Hyslop is the latest edition in the Visual QuickStart Guide series about HTML and CSS. A couple of changes are immediately noticeable about the book. Elizabeth Castro now has a co-author after producing 6 editions of this book on her own. And the book reflects a change in design Peachpit is putting into all its VQS books with full color and a generally brighter appearance.

While Peachpit can take credit for the new look, I can see the influence of Bruce Hyslop here, too. Having read, dog-eared, and dreamed my way through the first six editions, I see a change in these books that I think Hyslop must be responsible for. There is a different tone, the sidebars are lengthier and pull in a considerable amount of information about HTML5 and CSS3 from blogs and articles by a number of web design experts.

There are 21 chapters taking over 500 pages. Some of the chapters are fairly massive. “Video, Audio, and Other Multimedia” gets a 38 page treatment, “Tables” on merits only 5 pages. The chapter “Defining Selectors” is particularly good. Here’s the full table of contents.

  1. Web Page Building Blocks
  2. Working with Web Page Files
  3. Basic HTML Structure
  4. Text
  5. Images
  6. Links
  7. CSS Building Blocks
  8. Working with Style Sheets
  9. Defining Selectors
  10. Formatting Text with Styles
  11. Layout with Styles
  12. Style Sheets for Mobile to Desktop
  13. Working with Web Fonts
  14. Enhancements with CSS3
  15. Lists
  16. Forms
  17. Video, Audio and Other Multimedia
  18. Tables
  19. Working with Scripts
  20. Testing and Debugging Web Pages
  21. Publishing Your Pages on the Web

If your budget only allows for one HTML5 and CSS3 book, this book is a terrific way to invest your money. I’ve reviewed HTML5 for Web Designers and Introducing HTML5 on this blog. I think this book is better than either of those books. That’s not saying the two books mentioned are not excellent books, because they are. I’ve read both of those books carefully and I still learned new and helpful things from HTML5 and CSS3. Plus, the VQS style is inherently easy to use with each topic detailed in small step-by-step bits. It’s so easy to find the one thing you need to know at any given moment with a VQS book.

Another advantage of this book over the others I mentioned is that it can get a beginner going but it also offers a lot of good information for the experienced HTML and CSS wonk. If you’re teaching either of these topics, this book is classroom gold.

Definitely recommended.

Summary: Complete information about HTML5 and CSS3.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of HTML5 and CSS3 (rating: 5 stars)

Useful links: Mobiles, Advent, more Mobile

Top Ten Tests for Alternatives on Mobiles. “The tests below are just a subset of mobile accessibility guidelines that should be followed and focuses purely on alternatives for screen reader users.”

HTML 5 and CSS3 Advent. A web dev’s advent calendar.

Mobile HTML5. Charts for devices and what they support.

Review: Introducing HTML5

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Introducing HTML5 (2nd Edition) by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp is from New Riders (2012). The book includes everything from descriptions of new structural elements (like article, nav, and aside) to canvas, data storage, enabling offline, and drag and drop. It even includes some things that are not actually part of HTML5, like geolocation. There are many example codes, lots of JavaScripts and help with using new APIs to make your pages do all sorts of HTML5 tricks and magic.

In my opinion, the core audience for this book is the back-end developer who wants to write the scripts and do the programming to make HTML5 perform services that were not available before. The front-end developers will find the first few chapters helpful, but may be less interested in all the programming details in later chapters. (Front-end folks might consider HTML5 for Web Designers instead.)

The authors get a resounding +1 for including accessibility information about everything they discuss.

Here’s a look at the full table of contents.

  1. Main Structure: basics about doctypes, structural elements and CSS
  2. Text: new structural elements and how to use them properly, the document outline, WAI-ARIA and more
  3. Forms: new input types, new attributes, validation
  4. Video and Audio
  5. Canvas
  6. Data Storage: web storage, Web SQL, and more
  7. Offline: the cache manifest, applicationCache and more
  8. Drag and Drop: how to, interoperability
  9. Geolocation: API methods
  10. Messaging and Workers: chat, messaging, threading
  11. Real Time: web sockets, server-sent events
  12. Polyfilling: Patching Old Browsers to Support HTML5 Today: feature detection, various scripts, Modernizr examples

The book is written with a sense of humor and warmth that keep even the most tedious information from becoming boring. This is done in large part with humorous examples and illustrations. But beyond writing style, these guys really know what they are doing, and they want you to be able to do it, too. If you are looking for help with anything listed above in the book’s contents, you’ll find it here. The code examples from the book are all available for download, making the many snippets of HTML, CSS and JavaScript shown even more easy to use.

Definitely recommended.

Summary: Excellent guide for the developer who wants to put HTML5 to use right now.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of Introducting HTML 5 (rating: 5 stars)