ISBN: 1590593812
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Summary: A terrific book for intermediate web designers
Web Standards Solutions is an essential book for anyone who designs websites with CSS or wants to learn how. It's a solid book on CSS, and perfect for someone who is familiar with the basics of how CSS styling works, but is looking to learn how to use it effectively in real-world designs. But while this is an excellent book on CSS, it is a groundbreaking book on HTML.
This is a perfect second or third book on HTML. Everyone who works with HTML ought to have a nice big reference book, such as O'Reilly's "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide." Many people also have some kind of "Learn HTML Fast!" book. After you've worked your way through those and understand how HTML works, "Web Standards Solutions" is the book to have. It won't teach you how to write a web page: it will teach you to write a better web page. This book goes through repeated examples of how you might want to format some piece of information -- a list, a heading, a quotation, emphasized text -- and goes through various possible ways of makring it up. Cederholm explains the advantages of using HTML tags that imply meaning like "li" or "strong" over tags that imply presentation like "span" or "b". He also has a lot of coverage of useful semantic tags you may not be familiar with, such as dictionary lists, fieldsets, table captions, and citations, as well as discussion about how to use semantic tags to make your site more accessible to alternative browsers, such as screen readers for the blind and older browsers that don't support the latest design techniques.
The whole first section of the book is focused on producing effective semantic markup, along with some good examples demonstrating how that markup can be styled in various ways. The second section then goes on to cover additional CSS topics that don't require any changes the underlying content. Separate stylesheets for printing, producing an overall page layout, elaborate text styles, and replacing text with images are all covered.
This book won't teach you a huge arsenal of advanced CSS design techniques used by cutting edge professionals, but if you work through what's presented, you'll have a solid foundation, and you shouldn't have any trouble understanding new techniques you read about. The one real weakness of this book is that while it teaches a good selection of individual elements and techniques, it doesn't focus on putting it all together into building cohesive pages and sites.
Summary: Breif Review of Web Standards Solutions
I picked up "Web Standards Solutions" and Dan Cederholm's other book "Bulletproof Web Design" as a package from Amazon. While I prefer the latter because of it's smooth read and less academic feel, "Web Standards Solutions" provides a nice foundation for getting a handle of CSS essentials and limited markup. I only found it lacking in the area of advanced CSS layout, which can be a tad frustrating if you're looking to this book to answer all of CSS mysteries. Even those who are experienced with CSS may find some new insight in the area of limited markup, which is key in developing sites that are optimized for search engines and markup that is truly independent of it's layout. In short, it's a quick read and well worth the cost at any skill level.
Summary: More effecient internet UI solutions even with web frameworks like ASP.NET
To begin producing web solutions when 3.0 and 4.0 browsers were the standard much of my formal knowledge and experiential instincts had remained grounded there. Eventually ASP.NET 1.0 was released and I forgot that world for a time and went out-of-the-box. But by the time I decided to balance the tradeoffs between controls and manually input markup, the browser landscape had changed quite a bit. You got Firefox and Safari as well as much improved versions of more senior offerings.
It wasn't enough to use MasterPages, Themes, and Skins for my latest project. I also wanted to be XHTML compliant and reduce HTML and CSS footprint. In other words, I was shooting for smaller, cheaper, faster. So I checked out an article on A List Apart called "Thinking Outside the Grid". Although I didn't want agree with everything said (one indicating that I am that old), I did start to wonder if there was a better way. The better way I considered was how to lower overall complexity while boosting elegance compared the same solution in older technologies. Using the insights in the book can better position solutions for a wider array of presentation types.
By properly adopting the guidelines presented here, I significantly reduced extraneous markup I would have written to minimize strain on bandwidth. It also provided the grounding needed to migrate away from certain uses of server controls and better leverage non-programmatic techniques. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more effective CSS can be applied when using you properly structure the markup. Coupled with the W3C Validator on the web, you can arrive at some great finishing touches on the solution's markup specification.
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