Web Designer's Reference Friends of ED, 2004
Although the title makes it sound dry and academic, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a practical, hands-on book about building stylish web pages with CSS. There are chapters devoted to text, navigation, tables, and the CSS box model. But it's not just about CSS. Craig covers all the essentials for working with web pages. He hates frames, but acknowledges that they can be useful in the right context, and devotes a chapter to highlighting the pitfalls and how to avoid them. There are also chapters on choosing the best HTML and image editors, and a brief chapter on multimedia. As technical editor, it was my job to test all the code to make sure that it worked. It does. What I liked particularly about Craig's approach is that he doesn't simply give you the CSS style rules for a drop cap and leave it at that; he shows you step-by-step what each rule is doing. Consequently, you end up not only knowing how to create a nice text effect, but also understand how the rules interact with each other. He takes the same approach with pull quotes, navigation, and restyling the same content in different ways. My other role as technical editor was to make sure that Craig had got his facts right, and that everything was up to date with the latest versions of the W3C standards. Where there was any doubt, we pored over the specifications (not the most user-friendly of documents) until we were satisfied. The result is an accurate and user-friendly guide to all aspects of web page design that should appeal to beginner and expert alike. |
Web Standards Solutions friends of ED, 2004
One of the first things you notice on opening the book is that the Foreword is written by none other than Jeffrey Zeldman, the great-granddaddy of web standards advocates. As he puts it, Dan Cederholm offers "clear examples and no wasted words" of how to design clean, lightweight web pages. Whereas Zeldman's own book, Designing with Web Standards (also reviewed on this site), is more of a treatise on why such standards are so important, this is a practical guide to their implementation. It covers navigation menus, styling lists, hyperlinks, text, background images, etc, etc. Usually each example requires only a few lines of CSS, and in line with his principle of keeping things simple, Dan Cederholm shows you how to avoid becoming "class happy". If you don't know what that means, then perhaps you should just drop everything now, and order this book immediately. Being class happy is a stage that just about everyone new to CSS goes through (I know, I've done it myself), applying classes to just about everything in sight, ending up with markup that's almost as complex as the font tag soup it's intended to replace. Even though I've been working with CSS for several years now, I still found quite a few fresh ideas in this book, particularly on the use of less frequently explored tags, such as cite and q. I also found a lot of honesty. I was particulary wary when I approached one of the final chapters - on the controversial subject of image replacement. Dan Cederholm demonstrates three of the main ways of using background images to replace text, and highlights both their advantages and drawbacks, before going on to demonstrate how they can be used effectively in a way that doesn't damage a site's accessibility. The final chapter also shows how a site can be composed of both two-column and three-column pages with just a simple change of class. All very simple - deceptively so. |
Designing With Web Standards New Riders, 2003
In Designing With Web Standards, Zeldman nows turns his attention on designers and makes the case for switching to cleanly coded XHTML and CSS. He does so with passion, humour and a lot of down-to-earth common sense. The message is simple and appealing: standards are not about forcing everyone into a design straightjacket, they are "about building sophisticated, beautiful sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today". The question is - how? Does it mean abandoning tables for layout, moving all inline markup to external stylesheets, and converting all font sizes to ems or percentages? The answer is - it depends. Zeldman describes this as "a transitional book for a transitional time", and he admits that his some of his solutions will be regarded as "evil and sinful" by standards geeks. So, relax (unless you're a standards geek). This is not a hairshirt course in standards purity, but a practical guide to making websites that work in today's browsers, and that won't suddendly break when the next new browser comes out, as so often happened in the past. It also gives a clear answer to that hoary old question about whether to continue supporting Netscape 4 - Zeldman says to give people who use outmoded browsers the best visual experience you can under their limited circumstances, but do not exclude them. In other words, forget about pixel-perfect solutions that look the same in every browser (a virtual impossibility, anyway). But at the same time, make sure your site doesn't crash N4. It's easy if you create valid, logical code - and this book will show you how. Zeldman also offers eminently sensible advice about fixed and proportional font sizes. He uses a pragmatic mixture of the two, and frankly acknowledges "no matter what you do, you're going to frustrate somebody". Much of Designing With Web Standards will be familiar to anyone who has already embraced CSS and valid markup; and a lot of it has been said by others - Rachel Andrew and Al Sparber are just two writers who come to mind. What's useful about this book is that it not only shows you how to design according to industry-wide standards, but also explains why you should do it. (Money and time saved are just two good reasons that should have universal appeal.) The book also acts as a useful reference for such technical issues as Doctypes, workrounds for major CSS display problems, making sites accessible to those with disabilities, and making sure that modern sites are viewable in all devices - from text browsers to handheld PDAs. Zeldman acknowledges the web is constantly changing, but the advice in this book should hold for many years to come. |
The Web Professional's Handbook Glasshaus, 2003
Although the book is not a tutorial, it's not just a collection of tag references, either. Each section contains well-written background material, making it the sort of book that's useful to keep at hand and dip into in spare moments to brush up on what's now become a very technical and broad-ranging subject. Should you part with your hard-earned cash, though, and get this book? It's not an easy question to answer, as the people it will be most useful to probably already own several books covering the same subjects in more detail. On the other hand, do you really want to lug out a 1,000 page or more tome every time you need to look up an aspect of JavaScript? Is there room on your desktop for half a dozen books, or would you prefer everything to hand in just 400 pages? Particularly if you're travelling about, and need a quick reference book that's also a good read, then I think you'll find it money well spent. How does it compare with Jennifer Niederst's "Web Design in a Nutshell"? Both are excellent reference works, but this one goes much deeper into JavaScript and XML, making it more suitable for code warriors. Although they overlap in some areas, I'm happy to have both on my bookshelf. |
Fundamental Web Design and Development Skills Glasshaus, 2003
What sets this apart from the common run of "newbie" guides is the breadth of issues it covers, and its firm commitment to compliance with the standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium. In some respects the stance it adopts is highly controversial - telling newcomers to the web to adopt XHTML from day one, that tables for page layout should not be considered for new projects, and that sliced images are "old-fashioned". The font tag is firmly consigned to the dustbin, except in the chapters on JavaScript, where it makes an incidental appearance in a couple of examples. Frames are also out of the window. While encouraging a wholehearted embrace of Cascading Style Sheets and CSS positioning, though, sufficient explanation is given of the role they have played in web design to enable newcomers to cope with them. There's also a strong emphasis on usability, and making websites accessible to people with disabilities (an area of increasing importance as anti-discrimination legislation is enforced in countries around the world). But the tone is by no means sanctimonious. It's practical and down-to-earth. The two chapters on JavaScript will give readers not only a small arsenal of useful scripts, it will leave them with a firm understanding of how it works as a scripting language. The chapter on CSS teaches how to build a stylish menu with imageless rollover buttons. There's also a useful, but brief overview of the decisions involved in chosing the right technology for developing database-driven or dynamic websites. Clearly, it's impossible to cover every subject in depth in just under 400 pages, but the book deals with all the major issues in a practical and approachable manner, with plenty of references to other resources. The final chapter also contains honest advice about getting work in the web industry. |
Constructing Accessible Web Sites Glasshaus (Apress reprint), 2003
The United States has taken the lead by incorporating Section 508 accessibility guidelines into law, but the issue is also being taken seriously by governments around the world. Jim Thatcher and his co-authors address the problems from an international perspective, and they show that designing accessible websites can be achieved at little or no extra cost - as long as accessibility is designed in from the outset. Retrofitting a poorly designed site, by contrast, can be very expensive. Among the subjects covered are designing navigation systems that are compatible with assistive technologies, separating content from presentation with CSS, and utilizing the new accessibility features of Flash MX. There is also discussion of specialist techniques, such as the creation of aural stylesheets (for use with screen readers). However, the emphasis throughout is not on creating web sites for the disabled, but on sites accessible to everyone. Adopting the authors' recommendations won't result in drab design, but in many cases will make sites easier to use by the disabled and able-bodied alike. Note: This book was originally published by Glasshaus, and went out of print when the company collapsed in March 2003. It has been reissued by Apress with a new ISBN number. |
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This is my second collaboration with Craig Grannell, this time as technical editor (previously we were co-authors of Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004). Craig is a talented web designer, who is passionate about web standards, and in my opinion, he's put together a very practical and readable guide. As the book's subtitle says, it's "an integrated approach to web design with XHTML and CSS".
Dan Cederholm's personal website and company are called SimpleBits, a name that could equally apply to this nifty, little book. For anyone already deep into CSS, this book is probably a bit too simple, but for anyone still yet to be convinced of the value of embracing web standards, this is likely to be an ideal introduction. It's also perfect for designers who've decided to take the pluge, but still can't get their head around CSS. Although Dan's approach to design is "keep it simple", that doesn't mean boring or plain. What he demonstrates in chapter after chapter is that you don't need complex markup to achieve elegance. By keeping things simple, the accessibility of a site is also greatly enhanced.
For anybody involved in web design, this is quite simply essential reading. Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the prime movers in bringing an end to the period of browser wars when, as co-founder of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), he helped persuade Microsoft and Netscape to stop trying constantly to outdo each other in developing mutually incompatible browsers. Even though Internet Explorer has overwhelming dominance of the browser market, by and large it has adopted the same industry-wide standards as Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Safari. The only people not to have fallen into line are web designers, the vast majority of whom still build websites using cumbersome methods such as inline font tags, spacer gifs and deeply nested tables.
As the title suggests, this is a book for people who take web design seriously. It's intended to be a complete reference to client-side technologies in one book, covering XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, graphics, usability, accessibility, and web traffic analysis. Need to check what attributes a particular XHTML tag accepts and whether it's deprecated, or looking for a reminder of the correct JavaScript syntax? The answer's in here.
This book is aimed at a very specific market - people planning to start out on a career in web development - but is likely to be of value to a much wider readership. As I read through it, I felt it should be compulsory reading for a large number of people already in the business, who post questions on web design mailing lists and newsgroups. Here in one book, you have the answers to just about all the fundamental questions that anyone serious about web design needs to know the answers to. It's aimed a beginners, but in no way talks down to them.
Essential reading for all website developers - and for anyone with responsibility for commissioning websites. Accessibility is not just about making your web page available, it's making it accessible to people with disabilities. That includes anyone with poor eyesight or who has difficulty handling a computer mouse - and with increasing numbers of elderly people taking to the internet, that means a very large proportion of potential visitors.