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Web Standards Solutions
With the title Web Standard Solutions (which we will refer to as WSS from here on), you might expect this to be a book that is going to solve your problems, and without disappointment that is exactly what is does.
WSS takes a problem based approach instead of the commonly used project based approach to teaching you the value of designing to strict standards. I found this approach very refreshing, WSS kept my attention by presenting a problem, and then presenting 3-5 solutions on how to accomplish the task at hand. With each example Dan takes you through several ways to achieve the required result. Each of the methods shown are common patterns that different developers/designers would use, and the pros and cons of each are well articulated.
A lot of you may know Dan from his Simplebits. website. If you frequent Simplebits you will immediately recognize his style in the writing of WSS. Much like the mini quizzes that are used on his blog, this book is really a compilation of the hurdles that you are likely to face when trying to design to strict standards, and the solutions presented will get you over them.
WSS will also help the budding developer realize the business value of designing to standards. Once you start designing with standards, search engine rankings can jump, continued maintenance becomes a breeze, and the accessibility to screen readers (or other requirements) can be elegantly met.
One of my favorite parts of the book is the in-depth techniques used to style lists. WSS shows you how to take a regular non-formatted list and, using CSS, style it in several ways: as a vertical shopping list; without bullets and indenting; with custom bullets; and eventually as a horizontal navigation bar with changing bullets.
This book really stands out when covering the most basic foundations of layout such as paragraphs, lists, headers, titles and the like. The first half of the book really gets into the proper use of the most basic CSS techniques and proper selection of tags for headings, quotations, etc. While the second half of the book requires you to use what you have learned along the way to start building CSS based layouts.
If you are a regular at some of the advanced sites like CSS ZenGarden or A List Apart this book may be a little basic for you. Even still you will probably be able to take some techniques from it that you can use, this book is really more for the designer that is capable but not quite deadly with their CSS knowledge.
Overall I would give Web Standards Solutions the Markup and Style Handbook an 8.5 out of 10. I really think it does a fantastic job at keeping the reader interested in the subject (something that is often very hard to do in technical books) and will definitely be a great business tool for you. A quick read it is, but a valuable reference that has earned a spot next to my keyboard, my 3 bars of caffeinated soap, and the trusty case of bawls.
You can purchase Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
There are really no need for web standards. All you have to do is repeat what is so often written here with regards to bad spelling, poor grammar and incorrect usage: "Hey man, the language is dynamic and evolving."
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I wondered just the same. Guy reads book about CSS ... where's the wiener? Apart from the fact that you can just as well read the W3C specification, which is not too complicated at all, but the author of the article seems to be an utterly clueless idiot.
5. More browser-compatibility problems than the supposedly evil solution of HTML4 and its tables. At work I'm on a pre-OSX iMac, I have some hilarious screenshots on my hard drive showing how horribly a great number of CSS sites "degrade."
4. Too many files need to be downloaded before I can view the dang page. Remember how cool Netscape 0.9 was, because you could view the page instantly, as the images downloaded? I mean, at least as long as the author new about HEIGHT= and WIDTH= tags. Now, your browser often has to fetch three or four CSS files (and one or two javascript files) before it can even guess how to render the page. I'm sorry, when did managing the publisher's presentation layer become my problem?
3. It's not enough to evangelize a new religion, the W3C and other evangelists want to deprecate the older, working, time-proven system Web authors already know -- HTML. Why? KISS. And CSS ain't simple.
2. People are using CSS to make their sites even more tarted up than they were before, not less. The geeks tout CSS because they think they'll get their 1993 Web of H and P and A tags back. But that's not happening. Instead, the designers are using it to specificy esoteric fonts, leading, families, stem width, glyph height, stretching, etc. CSS was supposed to empower the rest of us to make websites render how *we* want in *our* web clients, but this hasn't materialized. Hardly anyone uses personal stylesheets.
1. People spend wayyy too much time making sure their pages validate or show up at all and wayyy too little time actually writing interesting stuff online. It's just a Web page. I'd rather read some interesting articles than stare at your "validated" button and read about Web standards for three hours.