I’ll be up-front and start by telling you what I won’t be teaching in this book: designing to the strengths of each platform. I can’t do that because I can’t teach what I don’t know. I became a developer rather than a designer for a reason, and that’s because when I use Photoshop, the result looks as if I were using the mouse while wearing boxing gloves.
What I will teach is modern coding methods and techniques that you can use to build websites that work across multiple devices or that are tailored to the single device class you’re targeting. (The technologies themselves are all explained in Chapter 1, so I won’t go into detail here.)
As you read this book, keep in mind these two very important points:
The pool of technologies is so vast that I can’t cover it all. I’ll teach you what I consider to be the core techniques and technologies that you need to know to build web projects across the range of devices.
Not everything in this book will end up having widespread adoption—at least not in the form I show in this book. The Web is constantly evolving, and book publishing means taking just a single snapshot of a moment. Some things will change; some will wither and be removed. I’ve tried to mitigate this by covering only technologies that are based on open standards rather than vendor-specific ones and that already have some level of implementation in browsers.
As a web developer, you should do this: Stay informed. Keep up-to-date with the developments in web standards, be curious, be playful, keep on top of it all. You’re lucky enough to work in an industry based on sharing knowledge, so follow some of the people and websites I mention in this book, find your own sources, get on Twitter, go to local web development community meetups. Stay involved and be active. There’s never been a more exciting time to work in web development, but you’ll need to put in an extra shift to really take advantage of it.
Above all, think of what you build in the greater scheme of things. If you’re building a website, don’t think of “building a site for web and mobile,” think of building a site that works everywhere. Think of how people will use it, what they’ll want from it, and what you as a developer can do to aid them in achieving their goals—not just now but in the future. We’ve seen such a major transformation of the Web in the past five years—who can say where it will be another five years from now.