HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using

Web designers can do some pretty cool stuff with HTML 4 and CSS 2.1. We can structure our documents logically and create information-rich sites without relying on archaic, table-based layouts. We can style our web pages with beauty and detail without resorting to inline and
tags. Indeed, our current design methods have taken us far beyond the hellish era of browser wars, proprietary protocols, and those hideous flashing, scrolling, and blinking web pages.

As far as we’ve come using HTML 4 and CSS 2.1, however, we can do better. We can refine the structure of our documents and increase their semantic precision. We can sharpen the presentation of our stylesheets and advance their stylistic flexibility. As we continue to push the boundaries of existing languages, HTML 5 and CSS 3 are quickly gaining popularity, revealing their collective power with some exciting new design possibilities.

GOODBYE

SOUP, HELLO SEMANTIC MARKUP

While slightly contrived, this example serves to illustrate the structural redundancy of designing complex layouts with HTML 4 (as well as XHTML 1.1 et al). Fortunately, HTML 5 alleviates

-soup syndrome by giving us a new set of structural elements. These new HTML 5 elementsreplace meaningless

s with more semantically accurate definitions, and in doing so provide more “natural” CSS hooks with which to style the document. With HTML 5, our example evolves:

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