Web Standards Solutions Book Review

Product:: Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions (SimpleBits)
What’s Good:: Easy Read, Good Examples, Standards Compliant, Wide Audience
What’s Bad:: Experienced designers may think of this book as a review

Why should I use when I could use ? Why does minimizing markup have advantages? Are tables really evil?

Web Standards Solutions lives up to the content of the authors website SimpleBits and presents an easy to read and understand book about the real benefits of web standards and how to use them.

This is a real solutions-oriented guide to using standards-based techniques in your daily work, written by someone who does exactly that.

Drew McLellan

Book Details

To be clear, this is not a manual. This book directs your attention to the benefits of accessibility and the advantages of using web standards. The Chapters are grouped into two sections to separate presentational vs structural markup. The first nine chapters are dedicated to organizing your markup code where as the remaining 7 chapters focus on using CSS to present that information. Dan describes that having markup that makes sense and is readable will have many more advantages then just using any tag at all.

After reading this book I have referred back to it a number of times. Web Standards Solutions acts as an excellent reference handbook to keep close by.

This book is designed to give you ammunition-ammunition to bring web standards solutions to your own projects and the ability to make better choices with markup and style.

Who Should Read This

Beginners: This book will not teach you everything there is to know about HTML or CSS but it will start you off in the right direction. If you want to get into web development, you might as well start off on the right path and learn the basics. Avoid the WYSIWYG editors and practice minimizing markup. Even after saying all that, I still think you could pick up this book and produce some simple looking pages without any previous knowledge of HTML.
Average: This book was made for you and I believe I also fall into this category. I know enough about XHTML and CSS to create a solid layout that validates but don't know enough to teach or write a book about. The examples and descriptions in this book did an amazing job of arguing why XHTML is better then HTML, Structure first then presentation second, and why accessibility remains to be a first priority.
Advanced: Depending on your skill level and experience, you may consider this book a bit of a review but reviews are good. The variety of topics covered in this book along side a number of Dan's own invented techniques (plus a few borrowed techniques) will give you more ideas about how others are working and be applied to your own daily work.

From the back of the book

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.

You hold in your hands a recipe book. With clear examples and no wasted words, designer Dan Cederholm shows how to put web standards to work creating beautiful, lightweight interfaces that are accessible to all.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Conclusion

Overall, this was a great read and sits nicely beside other popular books. If you are still building complex table layouts, still writing HTML 4 markup with font tags or can't even explain the difference between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, this book is especially for you.

Preview: Chapter 12 is available as a PDF

Dan does not seek to lay down the law, rather he interprets it, thinks within and around it, and leaves the reader to conclude for themselves the best approach to a problem.

Simon Collison

While preparing this review I was looking for what others had to say about this book. A bit of a surprise to find myself listed for a post I already made on my own site.

Comments

Daniel Burka - July 9, 2004 3:13 pm

I bought the copy of this book that Stephen based his review on, so I'll add my two cents. First off, I think Stephen nailed the review. Especially the description of how Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced people will benefit from the book differently.
I'd consider myself somewhere between the Advanced and Intermediate categorizations. I found a few new ideas in the book that have added to the tools at my disposal. However, the greatest advantage I found was that a number of the principles and de facto standards I had been following were explained and reinforced by Dan Cederholm. There were a few things I had been doing that I was pretty sure were correct, but I wasn't certain until backed up by his examples.
One of the strongest points of the book is the layering of examples. Dan doesn't just show you how he would do something, he explains all four possible ways to make something happen and then explains the pros and cons for each. For instance, he looks at the (in)famous Fahrner Image Replacement Technique and explains how screen-readers handle the myriad of methods that have sprung up to hand image replacement. Very valuable.
As Stephen said, the book is invaluable to the beginner CSS designer. I'm encouraging others I know who are just starting to dabble with CSS-based design to purchase the book to wrap their heads around the fundamentals and most importantly the reasons to use this type of design. The tone, content, and examples in this book are perfectly tuned for those getting to know the benefits of CSS but certainly avoid condescending to the more experienced designer. Get this and Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards and you've got the essential tools for designing with CSS.

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