When Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria and I formed A Book Apart, one topic burned uppermost in our minds, and there was only one author for the job.

Nothing else, not even "real fonts" or CSS3, has stirred the standards-based design community like the imminent arrival of HTML5. Born out of dissatisfaction with the pacing and politics of the W3C, and conceived for a web of applications (not just documents), this new edition of the web's lingua franca has in equal measure excited, angered, and confused the web design community.

Just as he did with the DOMand JavaScript, Jeremy Keith has a unique ability to illuminate HTML5 and cut straight to what matters to accessible, standards-based designer-developers. And he does it in this book, using only as many words and pictures as are needed.

There are other books about HTML5, and there will be many more. There will be 500 pagetechnical books for applicationdevelopers,whose needs drove much of HTML5's develop ment. There will be even longer secret books for browser makers, addressing technical challenges that you and I are blessed never to need to think about.

But this is a book for you—you who create web content, who mark up web pages for sense and semantics, and who design accessible interfaces and experiences. Call it your user guide to HTML5. Its goal—one it will share with every title in the forthcoming ABook Apart catalog—is to shed clearlighton a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.