Book Review for:

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

by Dan Cederholm

5 out of 5 Stars for Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

If you’ve read through some of my other posts, or even glanced at my Categories, you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of Web Standards. I also tend to buy my books based on other user reviews, as opposed to critic reviews. I like to get my review directly from the people using the book daily. This book current has a 5 star rating with 45 out of 52 5-star reviews on amazon.com and was a no brainer for me to rank it the same, for reasons I will get into later. This book was written in 2004 and a special addition was just released as well only 2 weeks ago.

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 <dl> 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 <dl> tag since reading this. Additionally, how many designers exactly use the <dl> 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 <body> 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. Additionally, author Dan Cederholm is a regular speaker at An Event Apart. If you havn’t heard of An Event Apart, it’s worth checking out. I havn’t had a chance to go yet, but would really like to. An Event Apart was started by CSS guru Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman who wrote the foreword on this book.

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

Paperback: 252 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (June 7, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1590593812
ISBN-13: 978-1590593813

Check out these Related Posts