The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design

The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design has been fully revised from its critically acclaimed first edition, and updated to include all of the new features and best practices of HTML5 and CSS3. This book reveals all you’ll need to design great web sites that are standards-compliant, usable, and aesthetically pleasing, but it won’t overwhelm you with waffle, theory, or obscure details!

You will find The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design invaluable at any stage of your career, with its mixture of practical tutorials and reference material. Beginners will quickly pick up the basics, while more experienced web designers and developers will keep returning to the book again and again to read up on techniques they may not have used for a while, or to look up properties, attributes and other details. This book is destined to become a close friend, adopting a permanent place on your desk.

The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design starts off with a brief introduction to the web and web design, before diving straight in to HTML5 and CSS3 basics, reusing code, and other best practices you can adopt. The book then focuses on the most important areas of a successful web site: typography, images, navigation, tables, layouts, forms and feedback (including ready-made PHP scripts) and browser quirks, hacks and bugs.

The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design is completely up-to-date, covering support of the newest standards in all the latest browsers, including IE 9 and Firefox 4. The last chapter of the book provides several case studies to dissect and learn from, including all the most popular web site archetypes—a blog, a store front, a corporate home page, and an online gallery. You’ll also appreciate several detailed reference appendices covering CSS, HTML, color references, entities, and more—any details you need to look up will be close at hand.

What you’ll learn

• The basics of HTML5 and CSS3 web design
• How to implement effective layouts, tables, images, navigation, forms and typography on web sites
• How to deal with cross-browser issues, including quirks, bugs, and hacks in IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and all other major browsers
• How to make sure your sites are both usable and accessible
• How to implement several different styles of web front-end, through several complete case studies, including a blog, a store front, and an online gallery
• Detailed references are also provided so you don’t need to learn every little detail of HTML and CSS

Who this book is for

Web developers and designers either starting out, or seeking to familiarize themselves with the new features of HTML5 and CSS3.

Table of Contents

1. An introduction to web design
2. Web page essentials
3. Working with type
4. Working with images
5. Using links and creating navigation
6. Tables: How nature (and the W3C) intended
7. Page layouts with CSS
8. Getting user feedback
9. Dealing with browser quirks
10. Putting everything together
11. Appendix A: HTML5 Reference
12. Appendix B: Web Color Reference
13. Appendix C: Entities Reference
14. Appendix D: CSS3 Reference