Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML [Paperback]

Leslie Sikos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1430240415 | ISBN-13: 978-1430240419 | Edition: 1

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML provides solutions to the most common website problems, and gives you a deep understanding of web standards and how they can be applied to improve your website. You will learn how to create fully standards-compliant websites and provide search engine-optimized Web documents with faster download times, accurate rendering, correct appearance and layout, lower development cost, approved accessibility, backward and forward compatibility, and easy maintenance and content updating. The book covers all major Web standards, focusing on syntax, grammar, recommended annotations, and other standardization concerns.







Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML is also a comprehensive guide to current and future standards for the World Wide Web. As a web developer, you'll have seen problems with inconsistent appearance and behavior of the same site in different browsers. Web standards can and should be used to completely eliminate these problems. Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML describes how you can make the most of web standards, through technology discussions as well as practical sample code that you can use for your own sites and web applications. It also provides a quick guide to standard website creation for Web developers.

• Learn techniques and best practices to achieve full standards compliance
• Write valid markup, styles, and news feeds from scratch or standardize websites by redesign
• Restrict markup to semantics and provide reliable layout

What you’ll learn

• The importance and benefits of Web standards
• How to write valid markup from scratch
• The most up-to-date standards, rather than non-finalized specifications
• How to provide meaningful semantics and machine-readable metadata
• How to restrict markup to semantics
• How to achieve full standard compliance reasonably

Who this book is for

Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML provides a complete reference of Web standardization resources for website developers.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Web Standards
2. Internationalization
3. Markup Languages: More Than HTML5
4. Serving and Configuration for a Modern Website
5. Style Sheets and CSS3
6. JavaScript and Web Applications
7. Metadata and the Semantic Web
8. Web Syndication
9. Optimizing the Appearance of a CSS3 and HTML5 Website
10. Accessibility
11. Web Standards Development Tools
12. Putting it All Together
13. HTML5 and CSS3 Best Practices
14. Markup Validation
15. Most Common HTML5 and CSS3 Errors

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Leslie F. Sikos, Ph.D. is an IT professional, hand coder, Web standardista and multimedia expert. He is a computer scientist and senior Web developer specializing in web quality assurance—including, but not limited to, website standardization in development and redesign, the Open Web Platform, XML technologies and XML serializations, the Semantic Web and metadata technologies, Web accessibility, and multimedia. A comprehensive assessment of his achievements and activities can be found on his fully standards-compliant website at LeslieSikos.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 524 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430240415
• ISBN-13: 978-1430240419
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #591,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > XML

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "Bible of web standardization", January 17, 2012

By 

HTML5 Maniac - See all my reviews

This review is from: Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML (Paperback)

Being a web designer from the birth of the web, I am well aware of the browser inconsistencies and implementation issues of technologies caused by the lack of consensus. In my opinion, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the most comprehensive book on web standards, because most books with a title containing "Web Standards" usually provide technology descriptions only that are often limited to the discussion of markup and style sheets, thus oversimplifying web standardization to writing valid HTML and valid CSS. In fact, there are far more web standards than the ones that speficy markup or styles, as described in the book in detail. Full standard compliance also covers proper serving, accurate settings for character encoding, valid news feeds, valid metadata annotations, valid XML, valid implementation of objects and scripts, as well as browser and resolution independence. Even the markup should meet additional criteria on accessibility, document structure, semantics, and interoperability. "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" covers the UTF-8 character encoding, the MIME types, HTML5 APIs, CSS3 modules, SVG, MathML, RDF, XML serializations, Semantic Web standards and machine-readable metadata, accessibility, and standardization concerns. The book has a dedicated chapter on validation, which is a fundamental task in website standardization, however, it is still missing from all the similar titles I've read so far.

The reader gets a wonderful mixture of theory and practical techniques. The book provides not only a review of web standards, but also a huge number of sample code to demonstrate coding from scratch. The code listings benefit from the hand coding expertise of the author. Moreover, the logical structure makes it easy to find any code, making the book ideal for daily use. The author compares web standards by category, and contrasts the competing ones.

The chapters on Semantic Web and web accessibility are extraordinary, and are better than many books written exclusively about these fields.

Undoubtedly, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the best book on web standards. I can recommend it to any developer, researcher, and enthusiast interested in web development and especially standards-compliant development. Even web browser vendors could learn a lot from it.

Since the references are precise and the W3C specifications can be retrieved through permanent URLs, the book might also be an excellent university textbook and ideal for web design courses.

A web designer without a copy of "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is like an IT pro without a computer. The importance of web standards is unquestionable, and web developers have to face the inevitable differences of rendering engines on a daily basis. The book helps web developers deal with these challenges.

In my opinion, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the ultimate book of web standards and deserves the honour of being called the "Bible of web standardization."

5.0 out of 5 stars Theory and code of web design, February 3, 2012

By 

Michael van Diermen (Adelaide, SA Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML (Paperback)

Well written with fresh up to date content on web site standards for development. Helped me quickly understand important design techniques and aspects for web design, which is important for development of professional websites for mass viewers. Useful for study as well as quick reference to subjects. Contains easy to read theory and code examples, with lots of things I did not know.