Designing with Web Standards Book Review

Standardise your HTML with CSS

Designing with Web Standards is a book about writing web pages that should be written once and be able to be displayed on any browser on any machine.

I expected Designing with Web Standards to be a book more about creating accessible websites than just about the history of CSS and how various browsers handle html.

Designing with Web Standards explains various bugs that exist in various browsers and how to fix those bugs by adding CSS code. The book also explains the do’s and don’ts of using CSS. Designing with Web Standards does talk about how in the early days a lot of web sites were created by using a number of tables for layout, where as now CSS can be used. But this means that people who do not understand CSS properly may just remove the bloated HTML code and then just replace it with bloated CSS commands, which defeats the object of using CSS.

Designing with Web Standards is a long book to read cover to cover at over 400 pages, but after reading it you may think to yourself what have I learnt from this book?

The best way to go through this book is to read a chapter and then apply your knowledge that you have learnt. The book does end with a good chapter on taking a web page made from only HTML and transforming it into a CSS and HTML compliant page.

If you want to learn CSS and HTML but don’t already know about HTML then I think a different CSS book would be better. If you have web sites that need transforming and cleaning up, that is, have the presentation layer separated from the content, this could be the book for you.