Customer Reviews: Read 98 more reviews...
 Great book September 15, 2008
Excellent book, brings up a lot of good accessibility and best practice points. This will make me a better web developer.
Useful techniques for everyday development September 14, 2008
Dan Cederholm runs down a list of tips and tricks where he teaches us how to protect our design in worst case scenarios, it's definitely not an entry level book and a great source of techniques. Recommended reading.
 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.
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