Customer Reviews

Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Every now and then, there a book comes along that really makes you stop and take notice. We review plenty of tech books on this site, and each one is a tome of knowledge in its own right. Web Standards Solutions though, is a work of art unto itself. Each page is full-color, with entire pages varying in color theme from the next. It feels as though you're thumbing through a high-end design catalog. I'd rank it right up there with The Zen of CSS Design.

Not only will this book serve to grace your coffee table, and make visitors "ooh and aah" over your fancy role as a web designer, it is also chalk full of helpful code and graphics tips. As with any multi-author book, each chapter has its own distinctiveness. Rather than attempt to down-play this, as with tech books, the chapters reflect the personalities of the author, both in tone and design. Here's a run-down of each chapter's topic...

Chapter 1 by Simon Collison
In this chapter, Colly covers the design process behind two of his acclaimed designs. He shows how to have solid markup, but at the same time create a distressed looking website in keeping with a band's musical style. The sites that are discussed are: The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things.

Chapter 2 by Dan Rubin
This chapter is also about a band website, Lifehouse. Dan explains the CMS limitations he was up against, and how he creatively used CSS to wrangle the underlying XHTML under presentational control. He covers everything from his initial sketches > to Photoshop > to the final product.

Chatper 3 by Ethan Marcotte
Departing from the band topics, Ethan goes in-depth on the planning, design and code process that went into remaking New York Magazine. He covers some adept code-forking that was necessary to get IE5 to behave on Windows as well as Mac. Thankfully, IE5 has since been dropped from the A Grade list.

Chapter 4 by Andy Clarke
The king of malarkey cuts loose in this chapter, and walks you through creating a lighthearted, fictional site called WorrySome. He digs into the modern method of using CSS attribute selectors to target highly specific areas of your markup. He also makes mention of Dean Edwards IE7 script, which forces Internet Explorer 5 + 6 to respond to these more advanced techniques.

Chapter 5 by Jeff Croft
Jeff covers everything PNG, showing how to make use of this great, loss-less format. One thing that has slowed PNG adoption, though it is superior to both GIF and JPG, is that Internet Explorer doesn't do PNG alpha channels very well. He shows helpful tricks to get these bad browsers working correctly, and explains how they were used on the 49 ABC News site.

Chapter 6 by Mark Boulton
This chapter is all about designing on a grid. A hold-over from the days of print design, this organizational technique lends itself well to web design. The grid involves logical layouts of content, as well as attention to typographical detail. If one chapter is not enough, Mark has also self-published a book on grid layouts, entitled Five Simple Steps - Designing for the Web.

Chapter 7 by Rob Weychert
Robs chapter picks up where Mark's left off, and delves further into the rich history of typography. He creates a classical looking site (using modern methods of course). It's an homage to the famous dark poet Edgar Allan Poe. You can see the results of his case study here - [...]

Chapter 8 by Ian Lloyd
One of the leading voices in web accessibility, Ian Lloyd shows you how to use JavaScript to make things more accessible. Impossible, you say? Not so. He goes through the code necessary to format a page on the fly in preparation for printing. This makes content more accessible as a physical, paper copy.

Chapter 9 by Cameron Adams
Better known as The Man in Blue, Cameron is inarguably one of the most authoritative JavaScript experts alive. If you haven't seen his new Blobular SVG demo, it will blow your mind. In this chapter, he shows how to make a modular, user-driven Newsvine style layout, complete with drag and drop.

Chapter 10 by Derek Featherstone
Derek is yet another leading expert and international speaker on web accessibility. In this last chapter of the book, he shows how to create advanced JavaScript animation effects, while at the same time keeping the content accessible to assistive technologies like screen readers.
Summary

So there you have it, one of the most comprehensive compilations of real-world web design solutions and techniques. I cannot emphasize enough how nice of a book it is because of it's full-color print. When Molly Holzschlag agrees to be the tech editor, and Andy Budd writes the forward, you just know it's gotta be good. All ten authors have knocked it outta of the park with this one.

This book is a bunch of use-cases developed by PRO technicians in Web standards (but Andy Budd, the author of the essential CSS MASTERY, have only written the introduction).
While some of the topics are of great interest, i can't help to feel a bad habit when reading them: the book does not follow a straight line to deploy the info, it's more like a collage rather than a well structured painting.
I also find the layout not such usable (a little paradox for a book that also talk about Web usability): reading the electronic version of the book the continuous change of background start boring me (and tiring my eyes) after 20 pages (i suppose the paper version must be better).
That said it's not a bad book, but neither a masterpiece.

There's no doubt the information in this book is great. Ian Lloyd's chapter on using the DOM to overcome some of the previously unnoticed shortcomings of print style sheets was particularly interesting.

The amount of information in the book is by no means overwhelming - its concise. Had the superfluous, non-illustrative design elements not been there, I estimate I could have read the book cover to cover on a short plane ride. Instead it's taken me a few long sittings and a few ibuprofen (to battle the headaches) to get in all the information.

The reason I didn't give this book five stars is because of the distracting nature of the design. This may seem nit-picky to some, but I think it becomes a usability/readability concern. It seems like every other page (give or take a few) is a different color, many with background images behind the text. Why? Maybe there's a reason... Maybe it's random. It's definitely distracting, taking away from the content itself.

It's understandable that the folks at Friends of Ed thought design embellishments would work with the underlying theme... IMHO, it's a little overdone.

I absolutely agree with one of the other reviewers who mentioned the extremely distracting design of this book. Whoever made the bizarre decision to make EVERY SINGLE page a different color, often printed with background images, should think about some of the authors' principals of accessibilty, and design not interfering with content. It makes it impossible to jump to a specific section or go back in the text and find anything.
Aside from the ill-conceived design, this book is excellent. Each author delves into not just "tips and tricks" but how to refine and improve a design, and implement that more sophisticated design on the web.

Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting by Cameron Adams, Mark Boulton, Andy Clarke, Simon Collison, Jeff Croft, Derek Featherstone, Ian Lloyd, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Rubin, and Rob Weychert --whew--was an excellent resource for any web developer. Each of the authors had their own chapter based on different aspects to create accessible, usable, and standards based websites. Andy Budd wrote the introduction and let readers know that this book was an extension to his previously published CSS Mastery--and I would agree. This book was broken into 3 main sections and 10 total chapters.

The first section was dedicated to Layout Magic. The chapters covered such topics as background images, page structure and contents such as menus, content highlights, and the masthead. We got a glimpse of how you can best manage, or tame, a wild CMS using CSS, Javascript, and Flash (sIFR). We move on to discussions related to switching your layouts based on your body selectors. This chapter exposes tips and tricks to create a website with several layout options--by switching a class on the body--all of the underlying markup is the same. Next we take our skills and apply them to a layout that jumps out of the grid or boxy layout. For those of you who have read Transcending CSS this chapter will be familiar as Andy Clarke walks us through a layout while using element selectors, descendant selectors, and adjacent sibling selectors. If you love pink, you will love this layout! The last chapter in this section discusses some creative uses of PNG's. I would say this was one of my favorite chapters of the entire book. Jeff Croft does a great job discussing the different image formats, their uses, and why PNG is now a viable option for your websites. He shows some great examples with the alpha transparency and it's uses for things like image captions, icons, and even watermarking and masking. This section gives you a solid foundation to begin creating some very exciting layouts.

The second section bridges the gap between print design and web design. Mark Boulton starts this section off by giving a brief history to the grid in print design and how this can be applied to the web. He shows us how to use background images and a little bit of math, allowing you to create websites that align to a horizontal grid. For those who have seen subtraction.com, or even Mark's personal site, markboulton.co.uk, you can see this example in action. The next chapter talks about Typography. I think that this chapter could have been expanded into it's own book--there is much to be discussed here. This chapter gives you the tools you need to creatively use elegant typography in your layouts'without sacrificing accessibility. These two chapters give a great primer on getting inspiration from other areas of design--including print.

The final section is related to the DOM and some tricks to enhance your website. The first chapter talks about printing. Using a mixture of print stylesheets and the DOM we are able to print specific sections of a page, while hiding the unnecessary elements of the page. The user is given total control--so this solution only helps to save a user from wasting mass amounts of paper (they can select to print the entire page if they would like). The next chapter discusses extending your layouts based on the size of the browser port (resolution-dependent, though not directly dependent on the screen resolution). The tricks here allow you to create a layout that looks great in a smaller viewport, and re-arranges the layout for those who use more screen real estate. This is not stretching with the viewport (fluid), but actually re-arranging your columns and navigation based on the viewport. Some very valuable tips in this chapter. The last chapter finishes us off with an accessible sliding navigation. This example can be found all around the web, but most of them don't always address the accessibility needs and issues that may arise. Derek Featherstone does a great job of putting accessibility at the forefront of creating the sliding navigation, while still giving you a stunning end product.

This book was a great read, and is packed full of great tips, tricks, and usable scripts to enhance the overall usability of your website. All of this is done without hindering the accessibility for the widest audience. This book is highly recommended for those who are looking for the best practices to achieve different effects. To be honest, some of the chapters were very elementary--while others were more advanced--but everything was explained very well by the authors and the code examples.

Out of three CSS/XHTML books that I bought, this one was the most disappointing of all. Disappointing because it's designed not so much for practical use, it's really for placing on the coffee table to show off your web guru status.

I simply wasn't inspired by the ad hoc generic ideas, presented as edgy "grunge" a la mode. If you're a web designer needing creativity ideas of this type (page 30 is a kicker), you really need to hit art school again. What's explained, you'll pick up in high school Drawing 101; hanging out at coding forums; or just googling for help.

Worse upon worse, reading the book will give you a headache. I simply couldn't read it through without vertigo. The book design staff believed in high contrast color schemes, that if you're color blind, you wouldn't have to worry about reading code, you simply won't see it (or wished to ban Opt-Art)! Lime green backgrounds with pale orange type (pages 71 and 75, for example), just doesn't cut it.

If you need a CSS/XHTML coffee table book, this will suffice. But if you need real inspiration and design ideas, save your money and eyesight, and find some other book (or search online for examples -- heck, the snippet code isn't much more than what's in the book, even).

What a waste of money.

This book arrived the day after I returned home to NJ after the "An Event Apart" conference in Boston.
Compared to the large volume of texts that have come out before it, this was a little bit of a disappointment.
If you're new to using CSS, then maybe it will be more helpful to you, but if you already own/read CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS, DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model, and the like... I wouldn't bother with this one.

The authors of this book have really done a wonderful job. The cases they discuss are as original as they are useful for real-world application.

It was refreshing to read a book about web standards that started not completely at the bottom. The authors will require some knowledge of HTML and CSS prior to reading this book, and that's good, since there already are so many beginner books available out there.

What struck me mostly was the inspiration I got from various examples in the book. It made me want to test the code and experiment further with the explained principles.

I can recommend this book to anyone who is already familiar with web standards and would like to have an entertaining read to broaden their thoughts on certain design problems.

This is the best web design book that I have found yet. Inspiring examples that use practical applications and will fuel your desire to learn more. This book is also beautifully designed... usually I highlight in my books but not this one... I will only tag it with sticky notes. Not a beginner's book. You may understand some of the example but most concepts, I feel, will be lost on the reader. If you are new to web design, I would suggest reading beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional, then CSS Mastery, then getting into this book. As a web designer, I would suggest that you learn CSS... and learn it well before you start building pages for clients or you may find yourself rebuilding may of your pages.

If you're a web developer, and you've already got the basics of javascript/DOM scripting, semantic XHTML and CSS, then this book is for you. It's the first book I've found that shows best practices for integrating all three of these basic technologies. As web developers we can often fall into the trap of being comfortable in one technology and then trying to solve every website problem with that technology. This book helps bridge the gap and begins to show how to use each of these technologies for what they're really good at--no more, and no less.