Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Preface

If you think you can take a web design book written in 2001 and “tweak” it for release in 2006, guess again. I know . . . I tried.

In my first draft of the XHTML chapters, I took the content from the last edition and just added some pointers to Cascading Style Sheet alternatives for font and a few other elements and attributes. After all (I figured), the (X)HTML Recommendations hadn’t changed since 1999, right?

As it turned out, while I was busy doing things like designing corporate identities and having babies (just one baby, actually), a major sea change had taken place in the web design world. My little pointers to CSS alternatives amounted to “band-aids on a gaping wound,” as so aptly noted by Molly Holzschlag in her tech review of those initial chapters. I had fallen out of step with contemporary web design, and I had some catching up to do.

I learned that while it was true that the Recommendation was the same, what had changed was how the professional web design community was using it. Designers were actually complying with the standards. They were no longer using (X)HTML as a design tool, but as a means of defining the meaning and structure of content. Cascading Style Sheets were no longer just something interesting to tinker with, but rather a reliable method for handling all matters of presentation, from fonts and colors to the layout of the entire page. That ideal notion of “keeping style separate from content” that I had been writing about for years had not only ...