Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns

Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns is a reference book and a cookbook on how to style web pages using CSS3 and HTML5. It contains 350 ready–to–use patterns (CSS3 and HTML5 code snippets) that you can copy and paste into your code. Each pattern can be combined with other patterns to create an unlimited number of solutions, and each pattern works reliably in all major browsers without the need for browser hacks.

The book is completely up-to-date with code, best practices, and browser compatibilities for HTML5 and CSS3—enabling you to dive in and make use of these new technologies in production environments.

Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns is so much more than just a cookbook, though! It systematically covers every usable feature of CSS3 and combines these features with HTML5 to create reusable patterns. Each pattern has an intuitive name to make it easy to find, remember, and refer to. Accessibility and best practices are carefully engineered into each design pattern, example, and source code.

The book’s layout, with a pattern’s example on the left page and its explanation on the right, makes it easy to find a pattern and study it without having to flip between pages. The book is also readable from cover to cover, with topics building carefully upon previous topics.

Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns book unleashes your productivity and creativity in web design and development. Instead of hacking your way toward a solution, you'll learn how to predictably create successful designs every time by reusing and combining modular design patterns.

What you’ll learn

• Code CSS3 and HTML5
• Use CSS3 Selectors
• Use six CSS3 Box Models
• Create rounded corners, shadows, gradients, sprites, and transparency
• Replace text with images without affecting accessibility
• Style text with fonts, highlights, decorations, and shadows
• Create flexible, fluid layouts
• Position elements with absolute pixel precision
• Stack elements in layers
• Size, stretch, shrinkwrap, indent, align, and offset elements
• Style tables with borders and alternating striped rows
• Size table columns automatically
• Integrate CSS3 and JavaScript without embedding JavaScript in HTML5
• Create drop caps, callouts, quotes, and alerts

Who this book is for

A software developer can use this book to learn CSS3 for the first time. A designer familiar with CSS3 can use this book to master CSS3 and HTML5. If you are completely new to coding or completely new to CSS3 and HTML5, you may want to read an introductory book on CSS3 and HTML5 first.

About the Authors

Michael Bowers has been writing software professionally for over 22 years. He taught himself to program when he was 14 and hasn't stopped since.

He is currently a principal engineer and enterprise information architect. He has been a software developer, architect, and modeler for many projects, ranging from web sites to application frameworks to database systems. He has built web applications, integrated enterprise systems, automated factories with robotics, developed a language, interpreter, and compiler, and managed teams. His favorite languages include CSS, HTML, XML, C#, C++, Visual Basic, Java, JavaScript, SQL, and XQuery.

Michael is also an accomplished pianist, with a bachelor's degree in music composition, a master's degree in music theory, and an ABD PhD in music theory. In his spare time, he loves to improvise, arrange, and compose music.

Dionysios Synodinos the research platform team lead at C4Media and a freelance consultant, focusing on rich Internet applications, web application security, mobile web, and web services.

He's also the lead editor for HTML5 and JavaScript for InfoQ, where he also regularly writes about the JVM platform.

Going back and forth between server-side programming and UI design for more than a decade, he has been involved in diverse software projects and contributed to different technical publications.

Victor Sumner is a senior software engineer at LookSmart, LTD. As a self-taught web applications developer, he has had many roles in the web application life cycle, from database administrator to web designer, and all aspects in between. He enjoys working on and solving problems that are outside his comfort zone.