Book Description
Web standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax. It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies. This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and precisely how to apply them. Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designer—indeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challenge—while the browser's support for web standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them. The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tables—this can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users.
* Use XHTML elements correctly so that your markup is compact and more easily understood.
* Use CSS to style different elements of a web page.
* Lay out pages easily and effectively.
* Compare multiple methods of achieving the same results to make better design choices.
* Learn about advanced web design techniques and their important caveats.
About the author
Dan Cederholm is a web designer and independent web author currently living in Salem, MA. His CSS redesigns of Fast Company and Inc. magazines' web sites have gained him the respect of web designers all over the world as an advocate of building clean, accessible sites with Web Standards. Dan also publishes markup and style tips and techniques on SimpleBits, his personal web site.
