ARC provided by the Publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book is good for anyone who's interested in learning more about HTML5 but don't know where to start. Simply HTML5 is a beginner friendly book to help you get started.

This book is called simplyhtml but I think that after Example 12, where the book moves on to HTML content categories it gets too complicated to quickly for the novice coder. I'm a software engineer brushing up on my html and I found that I had to Google quite a lot of material after that Example in order to really get a proper explanation of the code that would make sense to the novice

The examples started to have code in them with no real description of what the tags were or what they did.

I think the book might be better described as being a quick reference and that it could probably do with a table in it somewhere with a list of what the tags do.

Having said that - the book is very useful but it isn't simple.

I’m not sure who wrote this or what they were trying to achieve with it, but frankly it was a mess. Regardless, it's a shame the actual authors didn't get a mention. Anyway, I read this as I typically do, on my iPhone, and the layout was really bad. The contents list occupied no less than sixteen screens and was so poorly laid out it was useless for any practical purpose. I checked this out on my iPad for comparison and it was only marginally better on that.

The layout of the book itself wasn't much of an improvement, with one topic running into another in a way that was messy and confusing. There seemed to be no overall plan and there was a lot of repetitiveness. I wondered if this was another example of a book being written as a print book, with the ebook version being tossed in either as an afterthought or as nothing more than a means of allowing reviewers such as myself, who don’t merit print versions, to at least see it. If that’s the case, then it did them a disservice because it was a mess and, I assume, poorly represented the print version.

The contents table was a prime example, because it was supposed to be tappable - that you could tap on a heading and go there, but it had a long series of periods leading from the section title to the page number. Page numbers are irrelevant in an ebook. All you need is the link to tap on, but the links were so close together and so close to the edge of the page that you were more likely to swipe to the next or the previous screen than to go to the chapter heading, or you were equally likely to go to the chapter heading before or after the one you thought you were tapping. It could have been a lot better.

The HTML examples used in the book consisted of the HTML text first, then a green and white divider, and then the HTML as it would be seen on a browser (specifically in this case FireFox 80.0.1). I used 84.0.1 to test some of these examples and ran into issues with them – notably the ‘draggable’ attribute, which simply didn’t work. Other attributes did work. Some of the examples, though, made no sense. At least not to me.

Let me just say at this point that I’m far from an expert HTML coder, but I do use it on my review blog. I don’t go in for anything spectacular or fancy, but I’ve been doing it a long time and so I do have experience and I do understand the principles well. I also have some amateur programming experience in other languages, so I’m far from a newbie at this, but as I said, by no means an expert. I pass this information on just to say that my problems with this are not from a lack of familiarity with this sort of thing.

So when I read this: "HTML attributes values are generally case‐insensitive" and then just a couple of paragraphs later: "In HTML the tag and attribute names are not case‐sensitive but most attribute values are case‐sensitive" that's not my lack of understanding, it’s a direct contradiction! If it had been just one or two things, I would have thought little of it, but I kept on encountering problems of this nature.

For example, I read later, "Now their are some HTML attributes that are called boolean attributes." The word 'their' should be 'there' (there's no there, there! LOL!), but that wasn't the real problem. The problem here was the poor description and the examples. I read, "A boolean attribute when placed in an HTML element represents a true value, and when not placed in an HTML element the boolean attribute represents a false value." If it’s not placed, it’s not an attribute? Well duh! It just seemed pedantic and too wordy.

The book doesn't explain this, but a Boolean value, named after George Boole, is an either-or, a plus or minus, a 'yes' or 'no'. It’s one or the other with nothing in between. It’s the way digital computers work: everything to them is a one or a zero (or technically a low voltage - like four volts - representing the one, or an even lower voltage - ~2 volts - representing the zero), but the examples given don't make sense. After several examples of this type: <div itemscope=itEmScOPe>This is a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, we get a last one like this: <div itemscope="true">This is NOT a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, but this is precisely the same as the others - text within quotes! How is it any different? It’s not made clear what's being said here, and this whole section ends with: " I think you get the point of what is a valid and not a valid boolean attribute from the above example." No, I actually didn’t!

In another example, demonstrating the use of the paragraph elements, the code showed this:

Here is an example of the HTML<p> element below. <p>This is the first paragraph.</p> <p>This is the second paragraph.</p>

Which should work fine, but the example output showed this:

This is the first paragraph. This is the second paragraph.

Note that there's no paragraphing at all - it’s two sentences in the same paragraph!

Here’s just one more example: <p>The misspelled word <u>pharoah</u> should be spelled pharaoh.</p> This is valid HTML code and should result in the word 'pharoah' being underlined, but the example they showed for the output was this: The misspelled word pharoah should be spelled pharaoh. In other words - no underlining!

It was this kind of problem combined with a seemingly haphazard approach to teaching the reader how to use HTML that turned me off this book and made me DNF it. There is a need for books like this, but this one seemed too scattershot to really teach things in a logical and meaningful way. I think instead of the host of tiny unconnected examples it offered, the book should have oriented itself around creating a whole web page, but doing it in step-wise fashion, each new section of the book focusing on one aspect of HTML, and each adding new things to the overall page, teaching the reader how it all works as it goes.

In that way the reader could have created one page, stored it on their computer, added the new bits to it as they went along, and enjoyed watching the page grow in their browser. In this way they would have created something that worked, and that they could see grow as they went along. They could then later adapt for their own purposes if they wanted, being confident they knew how it all worked, instead of typing in unrelated bits of HTML which do only unrelated things, contributing nothing to any organized, overall web page design for the reader, who see zero growing from all their efforts.

But that's just me. I like the step-wise and the logical for books like this and this one seemed to dissipate too much effort on going every which way without trying to build a coherent whole out of what was being taught. It’s for these reasons that I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Many websites are powered by content management systems and other similar ready made setups. These are nice to get you going, but you might have a desire to change things around, or even try some coding on your own. Simply HTML5 can help you understand what goes on behind the scenes of making websites.

This book is not aimed at teaching you everything there is to HTML5, or the different programming languages, but it provides a foundation that you can build on. It is pretty simple to understand, though there a few areas that I would have liked to have had a little more information. I can still see this as being a good quick reference guide.

I received a complimentary copy from the publisher through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Simply HTML5 is simple as in survey not as in easy. The book covers most of the features and tags of HTML5 - not in-depth but by giving a starting point for self-learners or as a quick reference for experienced users. Occasionally the author assumes that an illustration adequately explains the meaning of a tag or attribute.

For example, he gives no clear meaning of the tag <p dir=”ltr”> - leaving the reader to see the examples and trying out examples in their own code to understand what it controls and accomplishes. The author says that dir specifies the direction of the text, though clearly it does not if the language used is English.


Similarly, he ends a brief discussion on “Boolean Attributes” by saying, “I think you get the point of what is a valid and not a valid boolean attribute from the above example.”

The book does not teach the use of CSS or JS, but it does include a chapter on weaving each into the development of a web page using HTML5. I found it interesting that examples were provided for a number of browsers (Firefox was the most common example, throughout the book), but Chrome's use on a PC was omitted.

The book may be useful as an ancillary text for a course, but not as the main text - no problem sets or programming tasks are given for students.
______________
This review is based on a free electronic copy provided by the publisher for the purpose of creating this review. The opinions expressed are my own.