Foreword to HTML5 for Web Designers, 2nd Edition
WELCOME to the second edition of HTML5 for Web Designers, the book that launched a thousand sites — or apps, if you prefer. It is also the book whose first edition launched our little craft publishing house. And its new edition comes to you when it is needed most, on a web riven by conflicting visions.
For some folks, the web today is what it has always been: namely, the most accessible medium ever devised for sharing content. For others, including the heads of powerful tech companies, the web is a platform for building JavaScript-powered applications whose purpose is to disrupt every industry on earth, chiefly for the benefit of investors.
Adherents of both camps are equally passionate — and both swear by HTML5, which was designed to create both kinds of web. HTML5 has given us a web both more powerful and more divided.
So much has changed over the past five years, it’s hard to remember that many businesses were still betting on Flash as recently as 2009, and still building sites and applications exclusively for the desktop browser. Then, in 2010, Steve Jobs famously declared that his iPhone would not support Flash. Flash was dead, Steve said. HTML5 was the future. A hundred thousand designers, developers, and site owners suddenly asked themselves, “HTML wha — ?” The next day, our little book came out, which was good timing for sales, but even better for the industry. And there are still no better guides to the new markup language than Jeremy Keith and Rachel Andrew.
In this book, you will learn what HTML5 is, why it came to be, and how to use it to create sites and applications as powerful as anything you can imagine. Forms, elements, semantics, scripting? It’s all here, guided by a set of principles as straightforward as they are noble — principles that deliver sophisticated web interactivity while remaining true to Tim Berners-Lee’s twenty-five-year-old vision of an open, accessible web that works for all. This book spells out a philosophy that will deepen not only the usability of your projects, but their humanism as well.
HTML5 for Web Designers is a book about HTML like Elements of Style is a book about commas. It’s a book founded on solid design principles, and forged at the cutting edge of twenty-first century multidevice design and development. Jeremy Keith and Rachel Andrew never, for one second, forget what moment of web design history we are in, and how much depends upon our ever bearing in mind not only our users in the wealthiest countries, but also the least of these. I know, admire, and continually learn from the depths of the authors’ belief in humanity and HTML. You will, too.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Publisher
A Book Apart
February 17, 2016
Originally published at www.zeldman.com on February 18, 2016.
Designing and blogging since 1995, Jeffrey Zeldman is the publisher of A List Apart Magazine and A Book Apart, co-founder of An Event Apart design conference, and founder and creative director of studio.zeldman. Follow him @zeldman.
