Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) | 
| Author: Dan Cederholm
Publisher: New Riders Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.15
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Avg. Customer Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 7598
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0321509021
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.7
EAN: 9780321509024
ASIN: 0321509021
Publication Date: August 19, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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Book Description
No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it's not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn't really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.
Guest Reviewer: Jeffrey Zeldman
 Modern web design is user-centered, accessible, and standards-based. In other words, it's completely different from the stuff we did in the 1990s. There are two vital aspects to designing with web standards:
(1) understanding why
(2) knowing how
Know-how is what Dan Cederholm has in spades, and in this updated edition of his essential text, he shares that knowledge with humor and clarity.
Dan's is one of the smartest minds in CSS and HTML. He is internationally known as a deep and innovative coder. But his background is in design and production, working on real-world sites for no-nonsense businesses like Google, ESPN, and Fast Company, Inc.
This grounding in practical user interface design and daily production issues makes Dan a great teacher of CSS, because he never loses sight of the things designers want to do (not to mention the things designers' clients and bosses demand of them).
From multi-column layouts that stay crispy in milk, to maintaining fine control of web fonts and sizes without alienating users: just about every problem a modern web designer faces is examined, with solutions ranging from good to better to best.
This second edition includes everything you need to know about taking Internet Explorer 7 into account. Little else has changed. And that's as it should be, for this book is a classic. It belongs on every web designer's shelf.
-- Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards 2nd Edition
About the Author
Dan Cederholm is a Web designer and author living in Massachusetts. He's the founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio. A recognized expert in the field of standards-based Web design, Dan has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo, and others. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using Web standards through his design work, writing, and speaking. Dan is the author of two best-selling books: Bulletproof Web Design (New Riders) and Web Standards Solutions (Friends of ED). Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.
Product Description
No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it's not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn't really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 A good book but... August 22, 2008
Some useful tips on creating good semantic markup. However, the author tends to build his case for this markup by citing tables on a lot of examples and the arguments to switch to a DIV structure. In some ways, I found this amusing as most of us know the benefits of table-less designs. The book reads more like a story telling similar to many technical analysis stock chart books I read based on past hindsight that no longer is relevant.
I bought this primarily to read about the indestructible box example. But I have to say after reading this that the markup is too narrow in scope. Not every box is going to have a DIV followed by an heading tag to create the rounded corners. Not only that but it was a fixed width example too so how can this be "bullet proof". Rather, the author should have come up with a generic solution so that the box can be sized width wise and lengthwise. Many people use a CMS and the markup to create a box is different.
All in all though its a good book to follow along to see how one goes about doing actual design in CSS. There's very few books out there like this that teach design while taking a hands on approach.
 Recommended but... August 10, 2008
Most of the solutions are very good but the "problems" behind quite a few of these are non-existing or not important at the most.
The rest of the subjects are OK and if you are prepared to skip about 1/3 of the book I can recommend it.
 Very practical and offers excellent practices August 6, 2008
I have been a so-called "table monkey" and have been longing to become a human being. So I picked up this book.
Throughout the text, the emphasis is placed in creating an XHTML/CSS page that does not break, when the user environment and/or the browser setting are not what the site designer expect or anticipated. At first I was a little skeptical of the author's rather strict adherence to the design that does not break in situations such as, say, a user uses a very large font setting for better readability; such a consideration may be of little importance nowadays, since even Firefox 3 now "zooms" in and out the entire page contents by default, not just text fonts. Furthermore, for many web developers under pressure to produce web sites that just work "well enough" for most reasonable cases, it does seem like the practices that are recommended in this book seem to take a little more care and time than desired.
However, all the design ideas presented in this book are very well thought out, and it actually does not take much extra effort to implement, once a designer gets used to them. I am in the process of updating my web design skills from what I knew as a table monkey, and I assure that this book offers plenty of enlightenment to those in similar situations as I am. Good thing is that once I learned the techniques presented in the book, I can come up with other effective ways to use CSS to fine tune layouts. Using HTML tables still offer some advantage if you need to support older nonstandard-compliant (Microsoft) browsers, but the flexibility of CSS just cannot be beaten if the site designs require extreme attention to detail.
The only drawback is that the presentation of the XHTML/CSS codes is slightly too meticulous and verbose for someone who is already very proficient in reading them. It is also not a cheap book for the amount of contents. Highly recommended, especially considering that the good CSS support in most modern browsers has started allow us to transform ourselves from table supermonkeys to CSS subhuman.
Best CSS Book I have ever owned June 21, 2008
This is easily the best CSS book I have ever owned. It's very easy to read and provides excellent, and sadly few, examples. Most importantly, the author does a wonderful job helping the reader understand concepts and how and why certain things are implemented.
Other books are FULL of examples... although they usually lack the details that someone like me need. The details, writing, and illustrations make this book much more attractive. Sure, Bulletproof Web Design isn't the end-all of books of this nature. It's short. You'll need more books. But any serious developer needs to read this book.
If you like "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, then you'll adore this one as well.
Good book/Wish It Worked for Some things May 27, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I purchased this book in the hopes it would have fixed my floating issues. It did, to a point. A couple of the examples didn't work well with Firefox. I found this book was helpful to fix a few things, but I did find that I was able to find other fixes online. I still enjoy this book, I just wish it worked better with Firefox browsers.
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