HTML5: Up and Running [Paperback]

I must say: I enjoyed going through this book. It is written in an opinionated and slightly irreverent style, so I found it a mildly amusing read.

That being said: why do people buy a book on HTML5? Some would like to have a good in-depth reference on the ins and outs of the new language. Well now - that's not this book. Others might be new to web development and think learning HTML5 would be a good starting point. While they are right that HTML (5 or 4) is the place to start, this book surely isn't.

There's some depth when it comes to background, but much less when it comes to HTML5 itself or how to use it. True, the <canvas> tag and geolocation are covered pretty much in detail, but the author made some hard to defend choices in spending his paper estate.

HTML5 gives us no more than a handful of new tags, still some of those (<mark> and <section>, for example) are simply mentioned once and that's that. No examples, no advise on where to use them, nothing on browser support. Yet the book takes five pages at the start to tell the story of how the img-tag came into being some 15 years ago. Again, mildly amusing, but probably not the reason you are thinking of buying this book.

Another example: there are 10 pages with a primer on audio and video codecs, plus another 19 (!) detailed pages (with lots of screen shots) on how to use a number of specific and probably soon outdated software tools to encode video for the web. All fine for those who are completely new to video encoding and believe a book on HTML5 should be the starting point for that. But when it comes to the actual <video> tag (under the aptly named heading "At Last, the Markup"), this consists of a meager 3 pages that include a statement like this:

"The <video> element has methods like play() and pause()".

Huh? "Methods like"? So which other methods are there? And how and where would I use them? Are these standardized across browsers? Where can I find more about them? Any example, maybe?

If you think these are the kind of questions a book on HTML5 should answer, you are out of luck. The above sentence is all the information on this particular topic you are going to get. Not a word about implementing these methods, or on how to style the browsers' native video controllers that come with HTML5 support. There are a good number of external references for information on things like Unicode, codecs and video containers, and some useful scripts, but not a word on how we can get the information on how to control and style the <video> tag. Maybe the logical conclusion would be: in another book on HTML5, perhaps?

In the 1970s, ABC's "Schoolhouse Rock" took the tedious process of making a law and distilled it down into a 3-minute song that many of us can at least sing the first few bars from ("I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill, and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill..."). Marc Pilgrim takes a different approach with the first chapter of this book, distilling the early history of HTML into fourteen eye-glazing pages. But if you can muddle through the initial proposal and discussion of the IMG tag, you get to Pilgrim's primary take-away of the chapter: HTML is not so much a thing, but a collection of things.

This is good, because the history of HTML has not been a smooth, step-by-step process. Different releases of different browsers have adopted different features of different specs at different times. I can personally recall rejoicing, back in the 90s, when both IE and Netscape finally implemented support for HTML tables. So it's no wonder that the second chapter dives into methods for detecting whether or not a user's browser supports certain HTML5 features.

If the first chapter was boring, the second is discouraging. First he shows how to check if Canvas is even supported. But once that's determined, you have to check if all the features of Canvas are supported. Moving on to the Video tag, even when that is supported, video format support varies across browsers. Basically, in these early days of HTML 5 support, it's like touring the United States early in the 20th century. Flush toilets and electric lights took longer to come to some areas than others.

After the third chapter started breaking down some of the new tags and how they affect the DOM, my eyes were good and glazed. This book is more discussion than documentation. If it was a car repair manual, instead of merely showing you the steps for changing the oil on your Honda, it would give you the history of the internal combustion engine, then detail different kinds of lubrication systems.

In short, there's a lot of valuable information in this book. Mark Pilgrim is no slouch on technical know-how or understanding of his topic. I just find the manner of presentation to be organized in such a way that I don't feel I have quick access to the information I want or that the available path to acquiring that knowledge is optimal. It's short on lab, long on lecture, and isn't something I'd make part of my permanent library.

This book feels like it was rushed to try to be the first HTML5 book published, the others I have ordered have all been pushed back several times as the specs/APIs evolve, this book was released as-is and it sure feels it. The 'Complete Examples' throughout the book are a mess and require considerable more work to be used as complete examples, they are at best snippets which illustrate very little. Several of the topics I was most interested in reading about were dealt with sparsely (some just in a single paragraph). In short, for an O'Reilley book I am quite disappointed.