Preface

Hello and welcome to the fifth edition of Learning Web Design!

I’ve been documenting web design and development in books like this one for decades, and it continues to fascinate me how the web landscape changes from edition to edition. This fifth edition is no exception! Not only is this version nearly 200 pages longer than the last one, but there are also some significant updates and additions worth noting.

First, some technologies and techniques that were brand new or even experimental in the last edition have become nicely settled in. HTML5 is the new normal, and CSS is moving ahead with its modular approach, allowing new technologies to emerge and be adopted one at a time. We’ve largely gotten our heads around designing for a seemingly infinite range of devices. Responsive Web Design is now the de facto approach to building sites. As a result, RWD has earned its own chapter in this edition (Chapter 17, Responsive Web Design). Where in the last edition we pondered and argued how to handle responsive image markup, in this edition, the new responsive image elements are standardized and well supported (Chapter 7, Adding Images). I think we’re getting the hang of this mobile thing!

I’ve seen a lot of seismic shifts in web design ...

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