Web Standards Solutions (Book Review)
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
This week a commenter asked me about resources for becoming a web designer and I referred to several books that have already been reviewed on this site. Another book which, for the beginning web standardista, is Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm. The only caveat being that I’d advise not using the !important or box model hack to achieve your own ends - this book was published in 2004. Otherwise it’s excellent for the beginner level.
The impressive part of Dan’s book is the approach he’s made to explaining what can be confusing new ideas by simply showing three or four alternative choices to marking up specific content such as blockquotes or lists or forms. Rather than showing the reader a dogmatic set of rules that must be obeyed, this journey is more about educating the reader on a very basic level to be able to make those contextual choices in everyday work. Because a lot of these decisions in the trenches will be about weighing up the pros and cons of any given situation. So this was an aspect that I particularly see as valuable - and sectioned logically enough to become a reference.
Admittedly, this wasn’t a book aimed at me and it didn’t contain the holy grail of granular secrets that someone familiar with complex web standards solutions might look for in a book. But it does fill that invaluable gap between the person with no web standards knowledge and the full blown standardista. With a foreward by Jeffrey Zeldman this isn’t a bad place to start your journey.
