Last updated 3/23/2006
Web Design in a Nutshell
Web Design in a Nutshell
Author: Jennifer Niederst Robins
Publisher: O'Reilly
796 pages .... $34.99
ISBN 0-596-00987-9
A Desktop Quick Reference
Completely revised for standards compliance, including CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0
Now that standards-compliant browsers are used by the vast majority of web visitors (see Chapter 2 for statistics), it is definitely time for designers and developers to start creating standards-compliant content.
Standards-Driven Design page 9.
Web Design in a Nutshell
is a grand reference for designing and creating web pages. It includes HTML elements and attributes, CSS properties and values, character coding, and color. It is a "quick reference" because you can find just about everything you need to know very quickly.
It is more than a reference to HTML and XHTML to write the structure of you web pages, and to CSS to write the style of your web pages. It is a reference to why you should write to these standards, with examples of how they should be written.
It tells you which browsers are standards-compliant, what shares of web use each has, and what the remaining problems there are because of browser differences.
In Chapter 25 Managing Browser Bugs, I read for the first time that Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows (not the Macintosh version) uses width as the total width of the box from which you must subtract the padding, borders and margins to get the content area. The standard used by all other browsers uses width to specify the width of the content area, and the padding, borders and margins are added to that. Fortunately, use of Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows is now not more than 3% of web users and shrinking. Web authors still include hacks described in this book to get around the problem because 3% of web use is still a very large number.
Web Design in a Nutshell
covers writing, page layout, floating elements, columns, lists, tables, frames, linking, and just about everything you need in designing web pages. In addition to images it covers sound, motion, and an introduction to JavaScript. These are just examples of the broad scope of the contents.
Jennifer Niederst Robbins has included a great many references to other sources of information including web pages, other O'Reilly books, and books by other publishers.
This book is much easier reading than I would expect in a reference.
For beginners who want to learn web design, I would recommend a book like Head First HRML, XHTML and CSS
from O'Reilly first. This would be a fine second book for beginners.
Owners of the previous edition will want this much needed and all new update. There are ten new chapters on CSS alone. There are a lot of previous owners because Web Design in a Nutshell
was a best seller with over 200,00 copies in print.
And, I hope that everyone else who is working on designing, developing, or maintaining web pages will take a look at this book. I am sure you will find it is a reference you must have.
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