

Review: HTML5 for Web Designers (A List Apart book) - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/review-html5-for-web-designers

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mrshoe
_I wanted to see sections about things like geolocation, drag and drop, Web
Storage, Web SQL Database, Web Workers, WebSockets and so on.

Instead I was greeted with this quote in the book:

    
    
        The [JavaScript] APIs in HTML5 are very powerful. They are also completely over my
        head. I’ll leave it to developers smarter than me to write about them. The APIs 
        deserve their own separate book.
    

Fair enough. Those are rather technical subjects and this is an introductory
book. I can live with that._

More than this being an _introductory_ book, it's a book _for designers_. The
target audience is neatly contained in the title of the book. This means that
_developers_ aren't going to get everything they might want out of this book.
As he mentions in the article, the term "HTML5" has become an abbreviated
moniker for a fairly large set of new-ish web technologies and standards. I'd
expect a book entitled _HTML5 for Web Designers_ to read more like _CSS3 for
Web Designers_.

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PStamatiou
Maybe I'm just used to smart folks in SV that call themselves web designers
but know tons of JS in addition to their Illustrator/Fireworks/PS magic..

I find that his quote about "completely over my head" being a little
shocking.. he's written a book on DOM scripting and another on Ajax. If he
can't grok these JS APIs I'm a bit worried.

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asnyder
It would seem by your definition they're not designers. The fact that they
know "tons of JS" would imply they have at least knowledge of basic
programming concepts, which is something I would not want, nor expect a web
designer to know.

The muddle of knowledge that's expected of SV designers, and other designers
in general is a result of the fragmented and confused state the web was/is in,
IMO. Frankly, with the current toolsets available, there's no reason a web
designer should have to focus on anything other than their design, and pass
that off to someone that's skilled in the programming aspect to get their
vision functioning. Personally I'd rather hire someone along those lines,
rather than a jack-of-all trades.

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rimantas
That's very very wrong thinking. All the best designers who were moving the
web forward few recent years are also good with coding: Dan Cederholm, Douglas
Bowman, Jason Santa Maria, Dunstan Orchard, etc. Remember, design is "how it
works", and you cannot do a good design without the knowledge of the
surrounding parts. This knowledge helps to bring the most of your main area of
expertise. Hire a designer who knows nothing about limitations of the
platform, hire a programmer who cannot tell cyan from blue and you will spend
the majority of your time trying to fit square pegs in round holes and acting
as a translator between the two with little success. And let's not forget that
with the current move to more and more interactive designs doing static
mockups makes less and less sense. There is some truth in "CSS is the new
Photoshop". A designer who knows how to code that nice menu effect with css
transition is highly preferable to the one who does not. Saves time and money
too.

~~~
asnyder
While I can recognize there designers that are the exception, it's silly to
think and expect your designers to have this ability. The fact of the matter
is that most don't. The same use true for developers. By and large the ones
that do are self-motivate individuals running their own startups, or
participating on a similar level.

I could easily say that it's preferable to have someone understand the core
facets of every part of any field, but the truth is that you're lucky if you
can find someone that has the core competencies in any specialized area.

I've successfully separated our designers from the code that implements their
designs for the past 5 years and have got only positive results. The designers
don't need to learn anything else, or fumble with code, they enjoy living in
Photoshop/fireworks and passing it off. Developers shouldn't be doing any
interpreting, the designs should be such they can clearly see what things
should be.

Nobody said anything about static-mock ups, I said they should be focused on
design, not coding. There are plenty of tools available that can allow them to
mock-up an effect without coding.

I don't know what idealized world you live in, but sometimes you have to
accept the situation and work with it. In any event, we can agree to disagree.
Since we clearly have 2 different sets of opinions and 2 different sets of
work experience history.

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jacobolus
This is much more a summary (+ star rating) than a review.

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PStamatiou
"review" is a better term for SEO than "summary" in this context :)

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blue1
Safari on ipad crashes on this page. Is that a new kind of sarcastic review?

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PStamatiou
Non-iOS4 Mobile Safari doesn't like Google WebFonts.
<http://code.google.com/webfonts>

