2025 Edition

Harness the power of HTML5 and CSS to create UIs that work flawlessly on mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and everything in-between. The bestseller, now with color images.

Key Features

Understand what responsive web design is, and learn to design effective, accessible, and future-proof front-end applications

Explore the newest CSS features like view transitions, scroll-driven animations, P3 colors, and CSS functions

Learn brand-new time-saving additions to the HTML language, including dialogs and modals

Book Description

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS, Fifth Edition, is the very latest, up-to-date version of one of the bestselling books on HTML5 and CSS. It emphasizes pragmatic application, teaching the approaches needed to build websites and applications, with downloadable examples.

Written in Ben's friendly and easy-to-follow style, this title can be read as a complete guide, or used as a reference for each topic.

If you're a backend dev looking to understand the front of the web stack and its possibilities, or perhaps a frontend dev looking for a comprehensive resource on everything new in HTML and CSS to build the most efficient UIs, this is the book for you. Even if you are deferring your code writing to AI, this book gives you the requisite knowledge to understand the validity and efficiency of AI's output.

Among the many topics, we cover approaches for better accessibility, utilizing variable fonts, explainers on the latest color manipulation techniques and functions, in-depth coverage of bleeding-edge features such as scroll-driven animations, view transitions, CSS anchor positioning, CSS layers, container queries, nesting, and much more.

By the end, you'll not only have a thorough understanding of responsive web design and what's possible with the latest HTML5 and CSS, but also know how to best implement each technique.

What you will learn

Leverage color functions to mix colors and convert between color spaces

Use media and container queries to detect touch/mouse and color preference

Leverage HTML semantics to author accessible markup

Use SVGs to provide resolution-independent images and learn to efficiently display them

Create animations as items enter and leave the viewport using just CSS

Discover CSS custom properties and make use of new CSS functions

Add validation and interface elements to HTML forms

Check whether the frontend code produced by AI tools is effective for your goals

Who this book is for

Are you a full-stack or backend developer who needs to improve their front-end skills?

Perhaps you work on the frontend and need a definitive overview of all that modern HTML and CSS has to offer?

Maybe you have done a little website building, but you need a deep understanding of responsive web designs and how to achieve them?

Perhaps you are using AI tools to produce code and want to check the output?

If any of those scenarios sound familiar, this is the book for you!

All you need to take advantage of this book is a working understanding of HTML and CSS. No JavaScript knowledge is needed.