Adapting to Web Standards
Following some sort of standards for all parts of your development work are essential if you are going to create something that works consistently and is easy to maintain. This book shows you how to apply appropriate standards to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and common server side languages.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Covers all aspects of web pages including both client side and server side.
- Includes real life case studies that show how the application of standards works in real life.
Cons
- Covers avoiding unnecessary markup and then provides examples that use unnecessary markup (fieldset wrapped in a div).
- Suggests using tabindex. Not only is the code unnecessary markup in the example used since that is the natural order anyway but using tabindex to change the order will make the page less accessible.
Description
- First Edition: Copyright January 2008
- 280 page paperback
- Published by New Riders
- CSS and Ajax for Big Sites
- ISBN 0-321-50182-9
- Authors Christopher Schmittt, Kimberley Blessing, Rob Cherney, Meryl K Evans, Kevin Lawver and Mark Trammell
Review
You would never guess that this book was written by so many different people just from reading it because the information contained in the book is well written, considstent, and logically ordered, something that many books with multiple authors lack.
The sub-title on the cover refers to big sites as the targetted audience for this book. I disagree with that sub-title as the content of the book is as appropriate for smaller web sites as it is for the larger ones.
All of the different aspects of a properly designed web site are covered, HTML, CSS, andJavaScript each have a separate chapter to cover all of the client side coding standards. While a single chapter covers all of the server side languages, much of the information presented is relevant regardless of which server side language you are using and where it does mentuion specific languages it is to discuss problems that those languages specifically have in generating standards compliant code.
Not being satisfied with telling you how to code to the standards, the book then concludes with two real life case studies of real web sites that underwent makeovers to bring their code in line with the standards. These case studies are particularly interesting because they cover when a larger site may need to consider breaking certain of the standards in order for their pages to handle the heavy load that their huge number of visitors represent. Conciously deciding to break standards and having a specific reason for doing so is a very different situation to inadvertantly breaking standards through failing to code properly in the first place and these case studies make it clear what that difference is.
Another excellent practical book from New Riders
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