Web Standards Solutions: The
Markup and Style Handbook, Special
Edition by Dan Cederholm
Great Book
Welcome to the expanded second edition of Dan Cederholms 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 browsers 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
youll learn Web 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. Youll 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 ���making them more efficient,
more accessible, and transferrable across multiple browsers and devices.
Personal Review: Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and
Style Handbook, Special Edition by Dan Cederholm
This book is split into two distinct sections, the first about markup (HTML)
and the second about CSS. I'll admit, I was hesitant about even reading
this book as my initial thoughts were "a book about HTML and CSS?
Really?" However, this is not a book about HTML. It is a book about using
web standards for common HTML tags that are used in non-standard
ways. The chapters include Lists, Headings, Tables, Quotations, Forms,
Phrase elements, and Anchors. Any web designer should know these tags
without further explanation. Each of the chapters answers a specific
question and provides four common ways of answering that question
pointing out the good and bad of each. Lastly, the chapters end with an
extra credit section that provides a little bonus on using the presented tag
in alternate ways.

So why, you ask, is this chapter on HTML so interesting? What I liked most
about it is that it provides excellent ways of styling and using tags that are,
as I said, commonly misused and even sometimes avoided because of the
difficulty in styling them. If you review the list of elements I detailed above,
most designers may agree that the tags that they struggle with styling the
most are forms and their elements. The best tip I pulled from this book was
to wrap form elements in a definition list element. For one, this provides
easy ways to align elements, but also still gives a nice layout when styles
aren't applied. I havn't developed a form without the tag since reading this.
Additionally, how many designers exactly use the tag in their sites
regularly? Again, since reading this, I find myself using it more and more.
The second section is all about CSS: Applying CSS, Print Styles, Layouts,
Styling Text, Image Replacement, and styling the tag. My favorite chapter,
and the longest in the section, was all about layouts. Again, it follow the
"question and four answers" theme towards both the traditional 2-column
and 3-column layouts and makes it very easy to design both. However, it
gets better with a nice chapter on multiple Image Replacement techniques
to provide nice header images without sacrificing the text for SEO and non-
styled versions of the site.
One last bonus the book gives is that it the book ends with a couple pages
with links to 20 useful websites for designers, many of which I use myself.
Again, this is another Friends of Ed book that I highly recommend,
especially for designers focusing on web standards. As the title of my
review, I have changed some of the things I do during web design because
of this book. I refer back to it constantly. I was hesitant at first, but glad I
made the purchase. I love this book.
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