
Jeremy Keith's 'HTML5 For Web Designers' is a great book. I can see that A List Apart's series will be a fixture in my studio, great design, great voice, bite size. Can't wait for No.2 whatever it might be.
But reading through the book a few things immediately became apparent. Web designers are already being told off for creating apps using the Canvas tag that will not be indexed as they do not follow the DOM model. Sounds like the same things we heard as Flash developers. Now why the design of a website should be defined by the capacities of search bots I don't know. I design sites for users with eyes: search bots don't have eyes so Google tells us. People need to find stuff sure, but why should we limit ourselves to designing for a robotic code reader?
Then I learn't that the HTML5 tag to rival to Flash is called Canvas ... and it was introduced by Apple, who are spearheading the fight against Flash. Ewwww Apple, you look worse and worse. What's more, Canvas is really just an API for running Javascript as an engine on a page. None of the content in the Canvas tag can be indexed and animation and effects are accomplished with complex code (as in Apple's HTML5 demo). Wait a minute I said to myself, this feels like Flash 10 years ago. You know what, it is Flash 10 years ago.
My warning, you will hate complex multi media sites coded in HTML5, CSS and Javascript more than you already hate Flash websites (Javascript was once considered a darker art than Flash).
In the meantime, bigflannel will keep producing fantastic sites that engage human users, can be found in the search engines, and are not limited by what a robot can decipher. Be it in Flash, HTML5 or whatever the next powerful tech company figures is its means to world domination.
P.S. It took the powers at be a pretty long time to even agree whether to call the new standard HTML5 or HTML 5, the difference being the space. Standards are great but I'm relieved Adobe chose to produce proprietary software, which they can develop and control as they deem fit, as it has enabled me to produce useful websites despite the lack of standards. Thank you Adobe.