Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way using HTML & CSS (2nd Edition)
When the first edition of this book came out promoting the idea of not using HTML tables for layout was a big thing and the book really pushed that view. Now that it is accepted that the page should be set out using CSS the book doesn't go far enough in explaining the right way and if anything the way it describes is now considered to be the wrong way.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Covers XHTML and CSS in a way that demonstrates to beginners how they can be used to set out a page.
- New concepts are introduced one at a time, mostly in a logical order.
- Goes beyond the basics to get you started on the right way to further enhance your site.
- Shows you how to use blogger to set up a blog on your own web hosting.
Cons
- Throughout the bok all the markup is done using XHTML which Internet Explorer 8 and earlier do NOT support despite the authors assurances to the contrary.
- Some of the entity codes listed are in fact invalid for XHTML
- Introduces mailto links without telling you not to use them unless you want millions of spam emails
- Tells you to place a space before the slash in self closing tags which isn't actually necessary with XHTML.
- Identifies an em as the height of an M whereas in fact all capitals are usually the same height, the significance of an em is the width of an M
- left out :focus when talking about pseudo classes for links
- Introduces absolute positioning before relative and floated positioning.
- left out the tbody and thead tags in all the table code
- wrapped form content in paragraph tags even though they are not paragraphs
- gives a wrong explanation of the difference between get and post methods
- suggests changing ids in forms to match names required by a specific form processor whereas in fact it would be better to keep the descriptive ids since only the names get passed to the server
- left Safari and Chrome off the list of browsers to test in for Windows whereas you should test in at least one of them
- Suggests using Google Analytics for statistics but the Google code is invalid if you are using XHTML
- Recommends learning JavaScript from the W3Schools web site which is the JavaScript equivalent of using tables in your HTML for layout
- The appendix from the first edition is missing
Description
- Second Edition: November 2008
- 438 page paperback
- Published by Sitepoint
- ISBN: 0-9804552-7-8
- Learning HTML and CSS has never been so much fun
- Author Ian Lloyd
Review
When the first edition of this book came out the need to use tables in your HTML to do your page layout had not long ended with the death of the last popular browser that didn't support enough CSS to avoid it (Netscape 4). Since then it has become accepted that HTML tables for layout is wrong and the first edition of this book played its part in educating web authors on how to get away from using tables except for tabular data. Since then the idea of semantic markup in the HTML has become accepted practice. Unfortunately while the second edition of this book shows some examples using semantic markup it also contains a number of instances where it uses the wrong tags for marking up some of the content (which is exactly the same error as using tables for something not tabular but without the hype).
While this book comments on the books on HTML that were around several years ago showing you thew wrong way to mark up your web page, this second edition is the modern equivalent of those books showing you what is now considered to be the wrong way to write your code. The worst example of this is the fact that the author mentions the appearance of the pages in Internet Explorer but all the sample code is written in XHTML which Internet Explorer 9 and earlier do not support (at least Microsoft have said that they have no plans to introduce support for it in IE9, I suppose they could change their mind but IE8 definitely just offers the file for download because it can't display XHTML).
Perhaps they should substitute the word "Wrong" for "Right" in the title so as to give people a better idea of what they will find. Anyway why does the title refer to HTML (which does work in Internet Explorer) when there is no HTML whatsoever in the book. This could have been a good book but all the silly errors will just give beginners the wrong idea of how to write a web page - something the book was supposed to have been written to fix.
More Information from the Publisher
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