Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications (Hardcover)

~ Elliotte Rusty Harold (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

“Wow, what a compendium of great information and how-to’s! I am so impressed! Elliotte’s written a book whose title comes nowhere near to
doing it justice. Covering much more than just refactoring, this book explains how to do it right the first time around, in a clear and lucid
voice. Harold obviously knows his stuff. A must-read!”
—Howard Katz, Proprietor, Fatdog Software

“After working with people who require the skills and tools necessary to continually improve the quality and security of their applications, I
have discovered a missing link. The ability to rebuild and recode applications is a key area of weakness for web designers and web application
developers alike. By building refactoring into the development process, incremental changes to the layout or internals efficiently averts a total
rewrite or complete make-over. This is a fantastic book for anyone who needs to rebuild, recode, or refactor the web.”
—Andre Gironda, tssci-security.com

“Elliotte’s book provides a rare collection of hints and tricks that will vastly improve the quality of web pages. Virtually any serious HTML
developer, new or tenured, in any size organization will reap tremendous benefit from implementing even a handful of his suggestions.”
—Matt Lavallee, Development Manager, MLS Property Information Network, Inc.

Like any other software system, Web sites gradually accumulate “cruft” over time. They slow down. Links break. Security and compatibility problems mysteriously appear. New features don’t integrate seamlessly. Things just don’t work as well. In an ideal world, you’d rebuild from scratch. But you can’t: there’s no time or money for that. Fortunately, there’s a solution: You can refactor your Web code using easy, proven techniques, tools, and recipes adapted from the world of software development.

In Refactoring HTML, Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how to use refactoring to improve virtually any Web site or application. Writing for programmers and non-programmers alike, Harold shows how to refactor for better reliability, performance, usability, security, accessibility, compatibility, and even search engine placement. Step by step, he shows how to migrate obsolete code to today’s stable Web standards, including XHTML, CSS, and REST—and eliminate chronic problems like presentation-based markup, stateful applications, and “tag soup.”

The book’s extensive catalog of detailed refactorings and practical “recipes for success” are organized to help you find specific solutions fast, and get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Using this book, you can quickly improve site performance now—and make your site far easier to enhance, maintain, and scale for years to come.

Topics covered include

•    Recognizing the “smells” of Web code that should be refactored
•    Transforming old HTML into well-formed, valid XHTML, one step at a time
•    Modernizing existing layouts with CSS
•    Updating old Web applications: replacing POST with GET, replacing old contact forms, and refactoring JavaScript
•    Systematically refactoring content and links
•    Restructuring sites without changing the URLs your users rely upon

This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices.
This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today’s standards-compliant best practices.

About the Author

Elliotte Rusty Harold is an internationally respected writer, programmer, and educator. His Cafe con Leche Web site has become one of the most popular sites for information on XML. In addition, he is the author and coauthor of numerous books, the most recent of which are Java I/O (O’Reilly, 2006), Java Network Programming (O’Reilly, 2004), Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003), and XML in a Nutshell (O’Reilly, 2002).

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (May 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321503635
• ISBN-13: 978-0321503633
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #594,847 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good review of xHTML standards for those already familiar with HTML, June 23, 2008

By	Michael Rimov (Corvallis, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First the good:
It is an _excellent_ tutorial on modern xHTML for those that have used HTML from its tag-soup beginnings. He methodically gives examples on why we, as web programmers, need to utilize a particular technology (CSS, Accessibility, etc). For example, he doesn't just say "Use CSS" because its the new way of doing things. He gives no-nonsense specific examples in bandwidth savings, alternate devices, etc.

His writing style is easy to read for computer geeks: a signature trait of any Martin Fowler signature series book.

He also provides a series of regular expressions that you can use to search through your HTML code to find problem areas and does a good introduction to the program "tidy". Since I am definitely _NOT_ a Regex geek, these are highly appreciated.

And finally, he shows usage of some xHTML tags and attributes of which I was not aware: such as proper usage of <acronym/> and <abbr/> tags.

Onto the downsides:
Originally I purchased this book thinking that I would be able to use it to get some tools under my belt to better transform the lousy auto-generated HTML that most graphics tools export and update them to decent, modern xHTML. However, the author is definitely NOT a "graphics design guy." And because of that, I know that several of the solutions he provided in his CSS sections would NOT fly with the designers where I work.

If I had seen his website, I probably would have realized that he was an XML expert instead of a design expert and wouldn't have gotten my hopes up. So far, I've found that websites like "A list apart" are much better for working with CSS-based design.

So for those looking to refactor your HTML code from ancient "Tag Soup" to modern sleek xHTML, this is a great book. If you're looking for how to best refactor from table-designs to table-less while maintaining a similar Look and Feel that you've been given by your designers, I find this book highly lacking.

5.0 out of 5 stars Offering a range of tips on how to modernize existing layouts or update old Web applications, November 9, 2008

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Elliotte Rusty Harold's REFACTORING HTML: IMPROVING THE DESIGN OF EXISTING WEB APPLICATIONS is also a pick for any library strong in web programming: it explains how to use refactoring to improve a web site or application and is written for all levels of programmers, offering a range of tips on how to modernize existing layouts, update old Web applications, and work with existing code and structure.

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mainly for hardcore techies, May 23, 2008

By	James Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold's Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code.

Harold's is a well known name in the XML world, and that background shows through in how he approaches the book. While a general audience will probably find useful content, the reader needs to be prepared for a series of command-line and Java-based examples. Tools like tidy are featured prominently, as is the use of regular expressions to seek out broken code to fix and, in the music-to-my-ears category, automated testing.

If you're equipped to do so, following these steps will lead to much cleaner, more manageable sites, but I found myself wondering how many of those comfortable with command line tools and regular expressions are in the market for a book like this.

In general I suspect the key audience for this will be IT departments inside large organisations tasked with refreshing or extending an intranet. For those developers, who maybe don't spend much of their time working with HTML and like the idea of using scripting tools similar to those in their regular workflow, this book's worth a look. If you're already familiar with current trends in web development, then there are probably other ways of picking up on the scattering of techniques that might be new to you.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.