If you are looking for a book that will be valuable during all phases of your career as a Web professional, this is it. This one volume works both as an instruction guide and a reference.
Like all well-written cascading style sheets (CSS) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) books, this one starts with an introduction to Web design, including a history of the Internet, and ends with a chapter showing the reader how to combine the covered concepts. In addition to excellent explanations of important topics, Grannell uses well-designed hands-on exercises to reinforce concepts. Files for the exercises are available for download from the publisher’s Web site. The download includes files used as a staring point for each exercise and versions of the files after all of the exercise steps have been completed.
Chapter 2 covers everything needed to create a well-structured Web page. The explanation starts at the top of the Web page, with the all-important DOCTYPE declaration, and works through to the closing HTML tag. The chapter concludes with a checklist of those items essential to all Web pages. One of the items listed is ensuring each page has a title tag with appropriate text. Some Web design software packages input “Untitled Document” for the title text, while others include the name of the software package. Neither helps the ranking of Web pages in search engines.
The next discussion covers the choice of fonts used to display text, a design decision that can significantly affect the readability of a Web page. Not all users have the same fonts loaded on their computers; Grannell does a good job of explaining the different types of fonts, as well as which ones work well for Web pages.
The longest chapter in the book discusses Web navigation. No matter how well designed individual pages are, they are of no value if visitors cannot easily get to the information they need. Inline navigation can be very effective in providing visitors direct access to related content. CSS allows Web professionals to style links within a Web page so they fit well with the overall Web site design, without being hard to find. The exercises for this chapter include instructions for how to style an unordered list for use as a navigation bar.
The next chapter is the standard discussion on the proper use of tables that are designed to display tabular data. The exercise example is a music playlist. With the proper markup, even a complex table can be made accessible to visitors using screen readers. Before CSS became widely used by Web professionals, layouts with multiple columns were created using tables. Chapter 7 is filled with exercises showing how CSS can be used to create these page layouts.
Chapter 9 addresses how to cope with the quirks of different browsers. As is usual with any treatment of this topic, the majority of the material focuses on several versions of Internet Explorer (IE). One way to target IE to tweak CSS rules is to use conditional statements that are ignored by other browsers. In the rare cases when non-IE browsers or non-Windows operating systems must be identified for special CSS rules, Grannell recommends using JavaScript for the task. One drawback is that some users turn off JavaScript for security reasons, so they miss out on the customization. I prefer using server-side PHP scripts to provide customized CSS rules that get around the JavaScript issue. Although both methods are susceptible to users changing the user-agent string their browser sends to the Web server, this is very unlikely for most users.
It is important that Web pages are tested using as many browsers on as many platforms as possible. Grannell recommends using Firefox or another standards-compliant Web browser for development. Testing using other compliant browsers should be followed by testing using a browser in text mode. This ensures Web pages are usable by alternate devices, for instance screen readers. Finally, test with several versions of IE for Windows.
The last chapter concludes with an exercise showing the reader how to create a style sheet for printing. Even though browser support for print CSS isn’t what it should be, it is improving and the results when your Web pages are printed are much better than they would be if the default browser styles were used.
The last hundred-plus pages of the book include six appendices containing references. The most useful ones are the Extensible HTML (XHTML) reference and the CSS reference.
I highly recommend this book to all Web professionals. It will be a good addition to everyone’s library. It serves as a learning tool for Web professionals just starting out, a source for refreshing skills for experienced Web developers, and a reference for all Web professionals.
