Web Standards Solutions:
The Markup and Style Handbook
by Dan Cederholm
I finished this a few weeks ago, sorry it took so long for a review.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was written well. Very easy to read and very clear explanations about everything he discussed. I would recommend it to anyone who has an excellent knowledge of HTML and XHTML and who has used CSS a little.
I learned a lot from this book.
Essentially, Dan Cederholm takes real world problems and shows you several ways to solve them.
I have two negative comments, but I want to make clear that overall this book was excellent!
Negative comments
- The example images were in black and white, but he ocasionally referred to colors. Of course, it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was talking about, but it was a little annoying.
- I found some of the examples were just a little simplistic and sometimes it seemed he was grasping, so that he could have several examples to fill a chapter. In chapter 1 “lists” for example, he said there were several ways to create a list using HTML including this:
apples <br />
spaghetti <br />
green beans <br />
milk <br />
and this
<li>apples <br />
<li>spaghetti <br />
<li>green beans <br />
<li> milk <br />
I’ve never seen anyone use the second example. If I’m not mistaken, doesn’t a <li> usually cause a line break anyway. And why would anyone use the first, when there’s a perfectly good set of tags with the <ul>’s and <li>’s that would work just fine.
Although, now that I’m re-reading what I wrote, if you didn’t know any CSS, you’d be hard pressed if you didn’t want any bullets or indentation.
In any case, it’s a good read, with a few minor things I didn’t like. Those few minor things however did not take away from the enjoyment of the book and the things I learned from it.
I recommend it.
