HTML5 for Web Designers

HTML5 is the longest HTML specification ever written. It is also the most powerful, and in some ways, the most confusing. What do accessible, content-focused standards-based web designers and front-end developers need to know? And how can we harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers? Jeremy Keith cuts to the chase, with crisp, clear, practical examples, and his patented twinkle and charm.

HTML5 For Web Designers is for people who create web content, who mark up web pages for sense and semantics, and who design accessible interfaces and experiences. Its goal - one it shares with every title in the forthcoming A Book Apart catalog - is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.

You can pre-order it now from the greatest publishers on the web, A Book Apart. It’s not a long book, by design. It’s got just enough to get you up to speed with the new shininess in HTML5.

Release Date: June, 2010

The State of Web Development 2010

Web Directions has issued a report on The State of Web Development 2010. In the survey, professional web designers and developers answer over 50 questions about various web technology topics. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

• Few respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use, but IE8 is the num ber one browser devel op ers test their sites in.
• Google Chrome has jumped dramatically as the browser of choice for devel op ers, to rank 3rd, at 17% just behind Safari at 20%.
• Firefox remains the number one choice by some way, but respon dents were split between 3.5 and 3.6 at the time of our survey.
• Firefox 3.6 was released only a week before the survey began.
• Over half of respondents now use Mac OS X as their primary operating system.
• Nearly a third of respondents (up from 16%) use Mobile Safari, while Android use is at around 4%.
• JQuery has become even more dominant, with nearly 80% of all respondents using the library, up from 63% last year.
• Desktop-??like application frame works, such as Cappuccino and SproutCore show little sign of wide spread adoption by developers. Perhaps the day of desktop-??like web apps is yet to come, or perhaps developers really aren’t look ing to build webapps which mimic the desktop.

When it comes to web development technologies, the big stories are CSS3, web fonts and HTML5.

• More respondents (45%) than not (44%) use CSS3 and experimental CSS, up dramatically from last year (only 22% then were using CSS3 and nearly 70% not)
• Last survey, only 4% were using font link ing using @font-face. This survey that’s climbed to 23%
• HTML5 is now used to some extent by around 30% of respondents, up from under 10% last survey

Most of the respondents develop to W3C standards and then try to work around IE. The decision has payed off now that new web standards are gaining wide adoption even in IE (9). The survey asked which CSS selectors the respondents commonly used and 80% or more indicated Class selec­tors such as p.classname {}, HTML ele­ment selec­tors such as p {}, ID selec­tors such as p#idname {}, and Descendent selec­tors such as p a {}. One major change from 2008's results was the increase in CSS3 and experimental CSS usage. Only 22% used CSS3 or experimental CSS properties in 2008, but now the users of those properties have surpassed the users who don't use them. The most used property is border-radius by a significant margin.

Also, these were the results when respondents were asked which programming languages they used on the server-side:

Check out the results to all the ques­tions, and you can down­load the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses in CSV for­mat or grab the PDF info­graphic overview.

“The State of Web Development” sur­vey is brought to you by Web Directions con­fer­ences, and Scroll Magazine, and con­ducted by John Allsopp

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