HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach
Authors
Christopher Murphy, Nicklas Persson
ISBN
1430216069
Published
24 Dec 2008
Purchase online
amazon.com

This book will teach you how to build hand-crafted web pages the Web Standardistas' way: using well-structured XHTML for content and CSS for presentation. By embracing a web standards approach, you will hold the key to creating web sites that not only look great in all modern browsers, but also are accessible to a wide variety of audiences across a range of platforms—from those browsing on everyday computers, to those accessing the Web on the latest emerging mobile devices.

Page 2 of 2
  1. Editorial Reviews
  2. Customer Reviews

Customer Reviews

Beere Wold said
First of all, I didn't just ordered this book blindly. I mean, I knew about its content, and how well written it were. Among many other books I could physically browse into and read, on the same subject, I found two books being outstanding, and this one being the best!

Here is how I went about about evaluating the content. As an engineer, I have got some expectations on how well done thing should be. I'm well-oriented on Networking, including HTML, and I needed some effort for my present project where HTML is part of the solution. I needed a comprehensive, structured and a content keeping some standard. This book offers the most in a very concise way.

I hope you don't need to have those "misty-engineer-eyes" to feel and get a similar perspective. And it's a book I definitely recommend for all kinds of reader regardless of background.

The reason that I ordered it from Amazon.com is the price. It costed half as much as it does at our local book-keeper here in Sweden, including shipping fee.

Y. Maman said
Where I'm coming from: I'm a backend developer who hasn't worked much with HTML and never got into front end design. I wanted to breach the barrier with a book that would provide me with what I needed to know to write semantically rich (x)html and style it without needing to become a guru.

This book does that and more.

The authors are professors but their tone is anything but dry. They're friendly but keep the content of each chapter rich with info, humor and advice on how to make use of it right away rather than wait to see some grand picture. The first half of the book introduces HTML but not as a grammar lesson. Rather it's always in the context of the kind of content you want to get out there and what the right tool (i.e.: tag) for the job is. The second half of the book explains how to style this content without any graphics intensive understanding. They show tableless one column and two column layouts and explain the various pitfalls beginners may have when attempting to set these up. There are also troubleshooting techniques explained (html and css validating, lurid palette to reveal what the divs in your document are actually doing...).

The book also lives up to the "standardista" claim. There are constant explanations of standards when it comes to using lists, tables (for tabular data), vs. 's, vs. @import and a host of other confusing road forks are covered in plain english with an eye toward the practical but standard compliant approach.

The companion site is excellent. Practically every example is shown there, so one can always look and compare to see that he or she is getting to where the authors want him to get.

I feel very enriched by the material and less nervous about tackling more advanced books on the subject of web design and web content.

F. Stepanski said
XHTML and CSS have been around for a long time, and there are lots and lots of books on the topic(s). But there are very few that explain these topics the proper way with regard to web standards and taking consideration to more advanced topics like SEO.

Whether you code your web pages from scratch or use a web design tool (Dreamweaver or Web Expression) or even use a CMS that creates most of the content for you. Understanding the presentation layer (XHTML) and what should and should not be used is important as you add on other layers (Structure and Behavior) with CSS, JavaScrpt and a server-side langauge.

The foundation of any website is XHTML and CSS and the author of this book really explains whats necessary with web design/

The author first starts off with what are web standards and how they have evolved over the years and with the most current web browsers. Then the basics of the different flavors of XHTML and DocTypes with the basic tag definitions..., ,

,
    , etc.

    My favorite chapter is chapter 3 which very few books (if any) explain what semantic markup is all about as well as what is meaningful tags and how they should be used. Yes, you can find this information on the web, but its all here at your fingertips and put together wonderfully with great examples.

    The chapters that explain CSS are chapter 8 - 13 and really are all you need to fully understand CSS properly. I love that the author includes links to useful online CSS tools like the list-o-matic and explains how to create CSS frameworks for all kinds of web page designs.

    There really isn't anything that the author has not covered in this boo about XHTML and CSS and I highly recommend it.

    Mary L said
    I bought this book because I wanted to learn standards compliant web coding. I've been building websites for a while now but I learned by trial and error, so I'm not new to HTML/CSS at all. I decided I wanted to learn to do it the right way, and I couldn't have picked a better book!

    Well written, thorough, no nonsense approach. I really enjoyed the hands on nature of this book and that it was so focused on building accessible websites.

    It could be said that this book is not for the more advanced user, but I can say it would serve as a great refresher to those who are experienced but need to brush up on standards compliance. Even though I can be considered a relatively advanced user, I still found this book very useful and the only chapter I felt I could skip comfortably was Chapter 7 on how get your site online. Even then, I still skimmed through it to make sure I wasn't missing anything I didn't know :)

    Standards compliant semantic web coding - if that's your goal then this is the book for you! Highly recommended read!

    Gregory Lunn said
    HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions reads like a textbook, and it should: the authors are both lecturers at the University of Ulster at Belfast, and have worked to create web development courses that use the most modern standards-based techniques for creating well-crafted websites. This approach makes the book and excellent choice for a newcomer to website coding, and is one of the best, most up-to-date examples I have seen of the details of creating standards-based websites from scratch.

    The first several chapters are dedicated to HTML and an explanation of why good semantic markup is important for organization, accessibility and search engine optimization. Each chapter builds on the last and provides details about every HTML tag and why you would use them. There are no hands on, step-by-step examples, but each chapter does include several code examples with matching browser screen shots, and a "homework" assignment at the end where the reader is challenged to apply what they have learned. There's even a chapter on setting up your own domain name and uploading your website to a server.

    The remainder of the book is dedicated to the art of using carefully crafted CSS styles to transform plain HTML into a well-designed web page. Although web designers already familiar with CSS might not find anything new or unique here, a new designer unfamiliar with Cascading Style Sheets will find an excellent presentation of the proper process for building up a stylesheet. Basic typographic principles, multi-column layout schemes, and creative use of background images to solve unique design problems are covered with solid code and appropriate examples.

    Those looking for advanced CSS ideas or new standards-based approaches to creative techniques won't find them here, but those looking for a solid foundation in the correct, most up-to-date methods for building modern websites will benefit from this book.

You might also like...

Comments

Contribute

Why not write for us? Or you could submit an event or a user group in your area. Alternatively just tell us what you think!

Our tools

We've got automatic conversion tools to convert C# to VB.NET, VB.NET to C#. Also you can compress javascript and compress css and generate sql connection strings.

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” - Edward V Berard