This is the updated and expanded Special Edition of Dan Cederholm's best-selling Web Standards Solutions. Web standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax. Utilizing web standards helps deliver content to the widest audience possible, while also ensuring future compatibility. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with different viewing devices, such as screen readers, mobile phones and handheld devices. HTML, XHTML, and CSS are all examples of Web Standards technologies.

This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and knowing precisely how to apply them.

Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designer-indeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challenge-while the browser's support for web stan- dards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards or to respect the need to adhere to them. The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently.

Web Standards Solutions is broken down into 16 short chapters, each covering the theory and practice of different web standards concepts and showing multiple solutions to given problems for easy learning. You'll learn about creating multicolumn layouts, using image replacement techniques to your best advantage, making the best use of tables and lists, and much more. This highly modular approach allows you to rapidly digest, understand, and utilize the essentials of web standards.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 54 Ratings

Solid if not exhaustive or succinct - 2008-05-11
Reviewer Rating:
Web Standards Solutions is reasonably solid title that discusses the benefits and approaches of using web standards in the design of (X)HTML markup. CSS is also covered as a means to remove presentational elements from web page markup. Lists, tables, headings, hyperlinks, forms, quotations and layouts are all covered to a foundational level.

The information covered in the book is especially suited to new web site designers who are yet to understand these concepts. Web application developers - who might not focus their craft on the quality of their markup, would also benefit greatly. For others already possessing an basic understanding of semantic markup and presentation through CSS, the book might contain a few useful tips only.

Throughout each chapter the book doggedly follows a pattern that can become tedious. For each chapter, non-standards approaches are considered before the 'correct' standards based approach is shown. After this the 'extra credit' portion of the chapter provides practical applications of the given solution. Whereas the correct solution and extra credit sections are useful, the repetition of the defective non-standard approaches for in every chapter is sometimes repetitive and slightly contrived, and could be discussed more casually as required without dominating the format of every chapter.

Having said that, the book is easily read, has examples and practical applications, covers the breadth of the topic well and could certainly be used to bring anyone up to speed on the basics of standards-based approaches to the web page markup development.

I've changed some of my design practices because of this book - 2009-05-27
Reviewer Rating:
This book is split into two distinct sections, the first about markup (HTML) and the second about CSS. I'll admit, I was hesitant about even reading this book as my initial thoughts were "a book about HTML and CSS? Really?" However, this is not a book about HTML. It is a book about using web standards for common HTML tags that are used in non-standard ways. The chapters include Lists, Headings, Tables, Quotations, Forms, Phrase elements, and Anchors. Any web designer should know these tags without further explanation. Each of the chapters answers a specific question and provides four common ways of answering that question pointing out the good and bad of each. Lastly, the chapters end with an extra credit section that provides a little bonus on using the presented tag in alternate ways.

So why, you ask, is this chapter on HTML so interesting? What I liked most about it is that it provides excellent ways of styling and using tags that are, as I said, commonly misused and even sometimes avoided because of the difficulty in styling them. If you review the list of elements I detailed above, most designers may agree that the tags that they struggle with styling the most are forms and their elements. The best tip I pulled from this book was to wrap form elements in a definition list

element. For one, this provides easy ways to align elements, but also still gives a nice layout when styles aren't applied. I havn't developed a form without the

tag since reading this. Additionally, how many designers exactly use the

tag in their sites regularly? Again, since reading this, I find myself using it more and more.

The second section is all about CSS: Applying CSS, Print Styles, Layouts, Styling Text, Image Replacement, and styling the tag. My favorite chapter, and the longest in the section, was all about layouts. Again, it follow the "question and four answers" theme towards both the traditional 2-column and 3-column layouts and makes it very easy to design both. However, it gets better with a nice chapter on multiple Image Replacement techniques to provide nice header images without sacrificing the text for SEO and non-styled versions of the site.

One last bonus the book gives is that it the book ends with a couple pages with links to 20 useful websites for designers, many of which I use myself. Again, this is another Friends of Ed book that I highly recommend, especially for designers focusing on web standards. As the title of my review, I have changed some of the things I do during web design because of this book. I refer back to it constantly. I was hesitant at first, but glad I made the purchase. I love this book.

A useful read for the web novice - 2008-07-23
Reviewer Rating:
This book was not exactly what I expected when I purchased it. I've been working with XHTML for 2 years professionally, but I still hadn't bothered to read up on web standards.

The book is well organized and goes over the basics of HTML elements (ol, ul, em, strong, p, etc...) and does a nice job explaining the benefits of using the most recent standards when selecting an appropriate tag.

Being that I have had experience coding, I'd recommend this book to those will little on hands practice or knowledge of markup. It's an excellent tutorial on the functionality of common HTML tags as well as some of the more obscure ones (code, samp, var, abbr, dl, etc...)

The most beneficial lessons learned in this book, however, is something the novice and experienced coder will appreciate: accessibility. W3C has been pushing the development of accessibility development for awhile. Screen readers and browsers are finally coming of age where such code considerations will set your website above others. Additionally, in professional arenas, accessibility can be a money-maker.

The author does an excellent job of explaining how screen readers and those with disabilities can benefit from more advanced and considerate markup. After all, how it looks matters little when your user cannot see the screen.

This Book Changed EVERYTHING for me - 2009-11-12
Reviewer Rating:
If you're just starting out with CSS or web standards (where've you been? welcome to the party!) buy this book right now. Don't think about it. I bought this back in 2004 and I've used it so much I probably have most of it memorized. At the time I bought it I knew I should be using Web Standards but I didn't know what that meant. This title revolutionized how I built websites. Even those who have been at this a while can find a lot of useful info here.

Great book - 2008-09-15
Reviewer Rating:
A great handbook showcasing common CSS uses. Will definitely keep this by my side when developing.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Internet/Online

Sub-Categories:
Internet/Online > CSS
Internet/Online > HTML