Product Description

Welcome to the expanded second 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. It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies. This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and 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 standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them. The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tables. This can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users. Expanded edition containing bonus material.Teaches how to use Web Standards effectively to build better web sites.Solutions style promotes learning by work-through examples and assessments.What you'll learnWeb 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 multi-column layouts, using image replacement techniques to your best advantage, making the best use of tables and lists, and many more. This highly modular approach allows you to rapidly digest, understand, and utilize the essentials of web standards. Use XHTML elements correctly so that your markup is compact and more easily understood.Use CSS to style different elements of a web page.Lay out pages easily and effectively.Compare multiple methods of achieving the same results to make better design choices.Learn about advanced web design techniques and their important caveats.Make your sites more efficient and more accessible.Who is this book for? Web developers and designers wanting to learn standards-based techniques to improve their sites%mdash;making them more efficient, more accessible, and transferable across multiple browsers and devices.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71775 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent book!
So you've figured out Web Standards are a Good Thing(TM), either by reading Zeldman's 'Designing With Web Standards' or because you're naturally smart. Now you need to know how to code with standards, and that's where this book comes in.

I've had the book since it was published, and since then it's not left my desk. It's taken up residence right next to 'More Eric Meyer on CSS', which ought to give you an indication of how good Dan's book is.

Rather than concentrating on a technology and just showing you all it's bells and whistles, this book uses a better approach. It states a common design problem and then presents multiple standards compliant solutions. Dan then takes you through each one of those solutions and shows you the good and bad points of each. You not only learn -how- to code well, you learn -why- it's good code in the first place, and that's important.

Dan's writing style is friendly, clear and does an excellent job of making you understand what's being said, so you feel confident about transferring the books examples into your own website. It's written in a way which should be easy enough for a beginner to understand, but isn't patronising. I would expect most web professionals will learn a lot from this book too (I should know, I'm one of them).

This is a great book and highly recommended.

5 star book for Practical Web Standards
I bought this book on the strength of the other reviews, and couldn't agree more with the 5 star status it has achieved.

I've been using CSS for a couple of years now, and although I was familiar with many of the techniques contained in this book, there were many moments of 'aaaah!' during the course of my read; litte things that can really make the difference.

If you're reading this review, then it's quite likely that you're interested in implementing web standards in your web sites.

This, when complimented with books from Meyer and Zeldman, should form the core of any serious web developer's library.

No hesitation in giving it five stars.

Awesome book!
Only recently I started coding HTML again after a long break (several years, actually) focusing on backend related stuff. I found out that there had been a strong move towards coding by 'web standards'. I learned to code HTML back in 1998-99 and therefore I had to upgrade my skills, which was one of my reasons for picking up this book.

Jeffrey Zeldman's book "Designing with Web Standards" put me on the right track, but I must say that "Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook" pushed even further down the track.

First of all I must say I like this book. I like it a lot! It is truly an impressive book! I was amazed by the speed of which I was able to consume the contents. It gives you a practical insight how to do some common tasks, e.g. a menu, a form etc. All the things that you used to do with tables, spacer gifs etc. are turned upside down. The book is well written, with no-nonsense (although a bit corny here and there) how to do common tasks according to standards. It's exactly to the point and no space is wasted anywhere. It's in no way an academic overview on 'web standards' but a down to earth how-to book.

This book really gives you a different perspective on how to do webdesign. If you have coded a little bit of HTML, with or without knowledge of web standards, this is the book for you. Unlike other books, this one doesn't hit you in the head with the dreadful web-standards-hammer. I cannot recommend this book enough. Excellent work!