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 become a possibility, it had become a reality.

I spent the next several months immersing myself in the world of standards-driven web design: reading every book I could get my hands on, exploring oceans of online resources, and of course, poring over the details of the W3C (X)HTML and CSS Recommendations themselves.

As a result, Web Design in a Nutshell has not been tweaked; it has been transformed. The book now opens with an overview of web standards and the measurable advantages of designing standards-compliant sites. The (X)HTML chapters have all been rewritten from scratch, in a way that promotes the proper semantic use of each element and radically downplays presentational HTML and how elements are rendered by default in browsers. There are now 10 chapters on CSS (the prior edition had only one). Two new chapters on JavaScript and the DOM, written by Aaron Gustafson, treat these topics in a more detailed and useful manner than the previous editions ever offered.

All other sections of the book have been brought up to date as well, reflecting some significant advancements (such as approaches to accessibility, support for the PNG graphic format, and print-specific style sheets, to name a few) as well as minor shifts (such as the guidelines on web graphics and multimedia production) that have taken place since the last edition.

The tale of transformation does not end with the book. This author has been transformed as well. Knowing what I know now, I shudder when I look at that first draft of the book. I shudder more when I look at my sites with their layers of nested tables, spacer-GIFs, and meaningless markup. Am I ashamed? Not especially...I was no different from most other web designers in the late '90s. You have to learn sometime, and for me, writing this book was my wake-up call.

I suspect that for every new web designer who comes along who has never used a table for layout, there are many more like me who need to relearn their craft. That's to be expected in a medium as new and quickly evolving as the Web. I've written this book to be the definitive resource for designers who are onboard with standards-driven web design as well as those who are still making the transition.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some sites to redesign.