HTML5 and CSS3

Author: Brian P. Hogan

Review created: 2019-07-25

HTML5 and CSS3 describes techniques that were made possible with the introduction of HTML5 and/or CSS3, or in some cases web standards that emerged at approximately the same time as those specifications. It does this in 34 short sections called "Tips".

Each tip is focused on a concrete goal, e.g. "Tip 13. Creating Multicolumn Layouts". A tip describes what we want to accomplish when solving the goal and perhaps includes some lines about how common solutions looked before HTML5/CSS, which usually was cumbersome and involved a lot of ugly hacking. It then describes a (much neater) solution using HTML5 and CSS3. Each tip is then rounded off with a part containing a proposal for a solution for older browsers that still don't support the new HTML/CSS versions.

This is a good approach, I like the format (as you might have guessed if you've read some of my previous book reviews ;). However....the book is old. It was written back in 2013 more than a year before the final HTML 5 specification was published. This means two things: 1) Without testing it or googling it, you can never be sure that a feature described in the book made it into the final specification and 2) that the versions of the older browsers the book lists workarounds for are so old that they truly are obsolete (the usage of IE 10 for example is listed as 0.1% in this report at the time of writing).

Problem 1) means that you while reading the book constantly are thinking "Is this true?". Number 2) means that the part of each tip where fallbacks for older browsers are described are more or less useless.

Does this mean that the whole book is useless? No, it does not. I learned a thing or two by reading it. E.g. I learned about the required attribute of input fields that can be used to make sure that a value has been entered into the field when submitting the form the field is located in. I now use this in the comment form in the blog entry page of my blog. Previously I has some, rather ugly JavaScript code that did the same thing. I've now removed that code and the HTML fields in which to display validation errors, which resulted in a smaller page and more nicely looking code.

Even if the book contains some good and useful information, the problems listed above makes the time spent on reading it not very well invested. I regret that I did not read it earlier. I bought the book along with two others in the autumn of 2014, but I haven't gotten around to read it until now. My bad. I should have read it directly when I bought it. Then the previous version of the blog would have looked better ;)

Summary: a book that most likely was a really good read in 2014, but now should be avoided. I'll give it a 3 instead of a 2 because it still contains some useful tips and because the writing style of the author is short, to the point and has a dry sense of humour.