Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

Daniel Cederholm

Jun 2004 · Apress

About this ebook

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 designerindeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challengewhile the browser's 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.

• 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.

Web Standards Solutions is broken down into 16 short chapters, each covering the theory and practice of different web standards concept and showing multiple solutions to given problems for easy learning. You'll 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.

About the author

Dan Cederholm is an award-winning web designer, consultant, and author who specializes in designing and building sites with web standards. Throughout 2003, Dan became well known for his redesigns of the websites for Fast Company and Inc. using standards-compliant methods, while pushing the limits of CSS. Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, for which he writes articles and commentary on the web, technology, and life. His consulting firm of the same name focuses on applying the methods found throughout Web Standards Solutions (Apress, 2009) in creating simplistic and attractive interfaces. Speaking at conferences such as SXSW Interactive, Dan shares his simplistic approach to web design and development while spreading the word on the standards-based markup and style techniques he's collected. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kerry, two cats, and one gecko.