A Beginner's Guide to HTML and Web Design  

The best place to learn about HTML is on the Web itself. A few of the best resources for exploring HTML design are listed here.

Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

HTML 5 and XHTML 2

While the intention of both HTML V5 and XHTML V2 is to improve on the existing versions, the approaches the developers chose to make those improvements is very different. And with differing philosophies come distinct results. For the first time in many years, the direction of upcoming browser versions is uncertain. Uncover the bigger picture behind the details of these two standards.

de Jonge, Adriaan. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

HTML 5 Timeline

Firefox 2.0.0.10 broke its implementation of the HTML5 canvas element and guess what, the world noticed. Actual websites started breaking because they relied on the canvas functionality to work. The point is that we expect implementations of HTML5 to happen way before the fifteen year mark. In fact, the fifteen year mark includes having all features at least implemented in two different (shipping) products in the same way with the additional requirement that they have a decent amount of market penetration. This means that when the specification finally makes it to W3C Recommendation it has already proven itself.

van Kesteren, Anne. annevankesteren.nl (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

The Mysterious Acronym Tag

There is a seldom-used tag called 'acronym'. It was originally mark up, well, acronyms. There is a very similar tag, also seldom-used, called 'abbr', which is intended to mark up abbreviations. Both of these tags were introduced in HTML 4.0. On the face of it, apart from marking up the text, these inline tags do little else.

HyperWrite (2002). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

New Elements in HTML 5

HTML 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command.

Harold, Elliotte Rusty. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

A Preview of HTML 5

HTML 4 has been around for nearly a decade now, and publishers seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers.

Hunt, Lachlan. List Apart, A (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

POSH: Plain Old Semantic HTML

POSH, in case you haven’t heard of it already, is short for “Plain Old Semantic HTML”, and is obviously much quicker and easier to say than “valid, semantic, accessible, well-structured HTML”. Unfortunately POSH - semantic markup - is also something most people building websites or creating content for the Web have yet to discover.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Another Look at HTML 5

It has become evident to me that some of my previous comments about HTML 5 and what is going on in the HTML Working Group are the result of misunderstanding and overreacting on my part. I no longer think things are quite as bad.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Is HTML 5 a Slippery Slope?

Tommy Olsson comments on the possibility of backwards compatibility and standardised error handling being bad for overall code quality.

Olsson, Tommy. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Help Keep Accessibility and Semantics in HTML

If you think accessibility and semantics are important and should be improved in the next version of HTML, you need to act.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Guidelines for Creating Better Markup

I’ve mentioned several times here that I feel writing markup (or any other code, for that matter) is a craft. I take pride in writing as lean and clean code as possible. From the looks of things there aren’t a whole lot of other Web professionals that feel that way, but we do exist.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey

Arguing for web standards and semantically clean and rich websites is an uphill battle. For years we had to deal with browsers that needed us to mess around with HTML just to display a document in several columns and the visual outcome was much more important than the structure.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Understanding 'aside'

HTML 5 offers a new element to mark additional information that can enhance an article but isn’t necessarily key to understanding it. However, in the interpretation of 'aside' there lies confusion as to how it can be used, and with that there is demand for the Doctor to step up and clear the air. In this article I will look at what 'aside' was created for, including sample uses and how not to use this useful, misunderstood element.

HTML 5 Doctor (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!

The blogosphere was jerked into excitement when Google gave a sneak preview of its new service, Google Wave. Only the select few have an account, but there’s an 80-minute video about it on YouTube for the rest of us. The service is an HTML 5 app, and so HTML 5 has gone from being too far away to care about to today’s hot topic.

Lawson, Bruce. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

HTML 5: Now or Never?

Here at SitePoint, we have started thinking about HTML 5, and whether or not the time is right to publish a book about it. To help us decide, we asked a number of web luminaries what they thought. Their answers were both varied and interesting. Take a look and decide for yourself: is it time you started learning about HTML 5?

Yank, Kevin. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

A Whole Lotta HTML5 Love

With the flurry of HTML5 tweets this past month, I felt it was somewhat easier to park some of them in a blog post. Retweeting was adding to the confusion for a non-HTML5 person like me.

STC AccessAbility SIG (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip

Now that the development of XHTML 2 is discontinued, should we stick to XHTML 1.0 or move forward to HTML 5 or better prefer the old HTML 4? Let’s set things straight once and for all. In this post we are trying to clear up the confusion, explain what is what and describe what markup language you can use for your web-sites.

Colbow, Brad. Smashing (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?

Today the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors.

St. Laurent, Simon. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Why Apple is Betting on HTML 5: A Web History

To get an accurate picture of why HTML 5 matters and how its adoption will change the future of the web and software in general, you have to take a look at the squabbling drama of contention that HTML 5 is emerging from as industry rivals work to achieve a new level of consensus on how the web should work.

Dilger, Daniel Eran. AppleInsider (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Video Introduction to HTML 5

Are you interested in HTML 5 and what's coming down the pipeline but haven't had time to read any articles yet? We've put together an educational Introduction to HTML 5 video that goes over many of the major aspects of this new standard. In the video we also crack open the HTML 5 YouTube Video prototype to show you some of the new HTML 5 tags, such as nav, article, etc.

Google (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Get Ready for HTML 5

Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Detecting HTML5 Features

You may well ask: “How can I start using HTML5 if older browsers don’t support it?” But the question itself is misleading. HTML5 is not one big thing; it is a collection of individual features. So you can’t detect “HTML5 support,” because that doesn’t make any sense. But you can detect support for individual features, like canvas, video, or geolocation.

Dive Into HTML5 (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4

HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes.

W3C (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

The HTML Scope/Headers Debate

The HTML working group have decided not to include the headers attribute in the HTML 5.0 working draft, as they believe the scope attribute is sufficient for associating header cells with data cells. With simple and most complex tables, this is a reasonable assertion, but doesn't work with overlaid and irregular tables, where the associated headers aren't in the same column or row.

Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Forward Towards the Past

I'm reading worrying things about the discussions about the next version of HTML, known as HTML5. It looks to me as if things are going in the wrong direction. Oh, and in order not to disappoint long-time readers there'll be a little barb against XHTML pretenders at the end of the article.

Olsson, Tommy. Autistic Cuckoo, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5