Weblogs: Book Reviews

Author: Molly E. Holzschlag
Publisher: Sybex
Publish Date: March 2003

One of the difficult aspects of web standards for experienced web site developers is making the actual transition. With too many developers with lots of experience in the amateur methods, the market is crying out for a decent handbook to guide and teach new web standards methods.

Structured Markup

Molly Holzschlag's Cascading Style Sheets: The Designers Edge fills this gap. It starts off talking about structured markup, focusing on the practical aspects as well as dabbling with the theory, introducing XHTML. With that foundation in place, Molly dives into a step by step explanation of stylesheets.

Stylesheets

The text is easy to follow and concise. Each facet of style sheets is introduced one piece at a time. From typography to fonts, through to colours and positioning. Molly explains each piece along with numerous examples and demonstrations.

The bulk of the book explains and teaches CSS, and its a pleasure to read. But it doesn't stop there. Molly wraps up with a superb step-by-step illustration of taking an existing tables based 'old-school' design and converting it first to a simple table layout with practical use of Cascading Stylesheets. Once the look and feel is similar to the original, she then migrates towards a pure CSS layout. I found the actual journey insightful and instructive.

Finally, there are a few case studies of web standards based designs, including the famous Wired redesign. Also, the reader is guided through a few Eric Meyer CSS showcases which points to the future potential of CSS as a capable design language.

A few oddities

There are a couple of errors in the text that cause a little confusion (for example some examples the style rules don't match the explanatory text: 'Styling the body element' p69, the body rule doesn't set all margins to 20 pixels). I felt there was a page missing between pages 113 and 114, where the topic jumps from a list of text-decoration values right across to text-shadows values plus examples - it felt like examples of text-decorations was missing. It may be just that the book flows so smoothly, and this section just hiccups a little.

Page 58 contains the only technical hitch: in the shorthand method of setting all four margins, the order is incorrectly listed. This has been picked up in the errata page for this book, and the correct order is detailed later on page 71 in the Note box. The error did throw me into confusion for a bit.

Recommendation

But still, this book is an excellent and practical guide about modern professional web development, just a handful of tiny flaws. If you are an experienced web developer or ecommerce developer that's worked with nested tabled layouts and you want to learn about web standards, give this book a try.

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