Table of Contents for
Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 - Second Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 - Second Edition by Ben Frain Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Second Edition
  4. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Second Edition
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewers
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. The Essentials of Responsive Web Design
  16. Defining responsive web design
  17. Setting browser support levels
  18. Our first responsive example
  19. The shortcomings of our example
  20. Summary
  21. 2. Media Queries – Supporting Differing Viewports
  22. Media query syntax
  23. Combining media queries
  24. Using media queries to alter a design
  25. Considerations for organizing and authoring media queries
  26. Combine media queries or write them where it suits?
  27. The viewport meta tag
  28. Media Queries Level 4
  29. Summary
  30. 3. Fluid Layouts and Responsive Images
  31. Introducing Flexbox
  32. Getting Flexy
  33. Responsive images
  34. Summary
  35. 4. HTML5 for Responsive Web Designs
  36. Starting an HTML5 page the right way
  37. Easy-going HTML5
  38. New semantic elements in HTML5
  39. HTML5 text-level semantics
  40. Obsolete HTML features
  41. Putting HTML5 elements to use
  42. WCAG and WAI-ARIA for more accessible web applications
  43. Embedding media in HTML5
  44. Responsive HTML5 video and iFrames
  45. A note about 'offline first'
  46. Summary
  47. 5. CSS3 – Selectors, Typography, Color Modes, and New Features
  48. Anatomy of a CSS rule
  49. Quick and useful CSS tricks
  50. Word wrapping
  51. Facilitating feature forks in CSS
  52. New CSS3 selectors and how to use them
  53. CSS3 structural pseudo-classes
  54. CSS custom properties and variables
  55. CSS calc
  56. CSS Level 4 selectors
  57. Web typography
  58. New CSS3 color formats and alpha transparency
  59. Summary
  60. 6. Stunning Aesthetics with CSS3
  61. Box shadows
  62. Background gradients
  63. Repeating gradients
  64. Background gradient patterns
  65. Multiple background images
  66. High-resolution background images
  67. CSS filters
  68. A warning on CSS performance
  69. Summary
  70. 7. Using SVGs for Resolution Independence
  71. The graphic that is a document
  72. Creating SVGs with popular image editing packages and services
  73. Inserting SVGs into your web pages
  74. Inserting an SVG inline
  75. What you can do with each SVG insertion method (inline, object, background-image, and img)
  76. Extra SVG capabilities and oddities
  77. Animating SVG with JavaScript
  78. Optimising SVGs
  79. Using SVGs as filters
  80. A note on media queries inside SVGs
  81. Summary
  82. 8. Transitions, Transformations, and Animations
  83. CSS3 2D transforms
  84. CSS3 3D transformations
  85. Animating with CSS3
  86. Summary
  87. 9. Conquer Forms with HTML5 and CSS3
  88. Understanding the component parts of HTML5 forms
  89. HTML5 input types
  90. How to polyfill non-supporting browsers
  91. Styling HTML5 forms with CSS3
  92. Summary
  93. 10. Approaching a Responsive Web Design
  94. View and use the design on real devices
  95. Embracing progressive enhancement
  96. Defining a browser support matrix
  97. Tiering the user experience
  98. Linking CSS breakpoints to JavaScript
  99. Avoid CSS frameworks in production
  100. Coding pragmatic solutions
  101. Use the simplest code possible
  102. Hiding, showing, and loading content across viewports
  103. Validators and linting tools
  104. Performance
  105. The next big things
  106. Summary
  107. Index

Chapter 4. HTML5 for Responsive Web Designs

If you are looking for guidance on using the HTML5 application programming interfaces (APIs), I'm going to paraphrase a line from a great Western movie and say, "I'm not your Huckleberry".

What I would like to look at with you is the 'vocabulary' part of HTML5; its semantics. More succinctly, the way we can use the new elements of HTML5 to describe the content we place in markup. The majority of content in this chapter is not specific to a responsive web design. However, HTML is the very foundation upon which all web-based designs and applications are built. Who doesn't want to build upon the strongest possible foundation?

You might be wondering 'what is HTML5 anyway?' In which case I would tell you that HTML5 is simply the description given to the latest version of HTML, the language of tags we use to build web pages. HTML itself is a constantly evolving standard, with the prior major version being 4.01.

For a little more background on the versions and timeline of HTML's evolution, you can read the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_versions_timeline.

Tip

HTML5 is now a recommendation from the W3C. You can read the specification at http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/.

The topics we will cover in this chapter are:

  • How well supported is HTML5?
  • Starting an HTML5 page the right way
  • Easy-going HTML5
  • New semantic elements
  • Text-level semantics
  • Obsolete features
  • Putting the new elements to use
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility conformance and Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) for more accessible web applications
  • Embedding media
  • Responsive video and iFrames
  • A note about 'offline first'

Note

HTML5 also provides specific tools for handling forms and user input. This set of features takes much of the burden away from more resource heavy technologies like JavaScript for things like form validation. However, we're going to look at HTML5 forms separately in Chapter 9, Conquer Forms with HTML5 and CSS3.

HTML5 markup – understood by all modern browsers

Nowadays, the majority of websites I see (and all of those I make myself) are written using HTML5, rather than the older HTML 4.01 standard.

All modern browsers understand the new semantic elements of HTML5 (the new structural elements, video, and audio tags) and even older versions of Internet Explorer (versions before Internet Explorer 9) can be served a tiny 'polyfill' to allow it to render these new elements.

Note

What is a polyfill?

The term polyfill was originated by Remy Sharp as an allusion to filling the cracks in older browsers with Polyfilla (known as Spackling Paste in the US). Therefore, a polyfill is a JavaScript 'shim' to effectively replicate newer features in older browsers. However, it's important to be aware that polyfills add extra flab to your code. Therefore, even if you could add 15 polyfill scripts to make Internet Explorer 6 render a site identically to every other browser, it doesn't mean you necessarily should.

If you need to enable HTML5 structural elements, I'd look at Remy Sharp's original script (http://remysharp.com/2009/01/07/html5-enabling-script/) or create a custom build of Modernizr (http://modernizr.com). If Modernizr is a tool you've not come across or used, there is a whole section on it in the next chapter.

With that in mind, let's consider the start of an HTML5 page. Let's get a handle on all the opening tags and what they do.