Through simple illistrations and small code snippets this book covers pretty much what one would need to know in order to create great web 2.0 sites.

This book is the 2nd one by Dan Cederholm that I bought and can be used as "Advanced Chapters" to his short but overall excellent "Bulletproof Web Design" (ISBN-10: 0321346939). These two combined will surely set your brains straight about standards-based HTML/CSS development.

It explains how to make your markup short. It shows why using purposeful HTML tags (such as "label") is preferred to using generic divs with classes. It destroys new and "hip" myth about tables being "taboo" for modern HTML.

I whish I'd read this one sooner. This book is a great introduction to the fabulous world of web standards. This is not, however the right book if you are already an experienced coder of standardized (X)HTML. Unlike books such as CSS Mastery (Budd, Moll, Collison), this book contains little of the "oh, right - I had completely forgot about that" tips, that experienced users could use.

If you have done little web standards (X)HTML and would like a good place to start, this is absolutely a book I would reccomend. If you know your web standards, and like them too, I would reccomend looking elsewhere.

Another winner - besides the clearly and coherently techniques illustrated in this book, what I'll take away from the enlightening experience is how to design sites that are very maintenance-friendly, optimized for speed, and reusability-friendly. Again, the author teaches how to avoid code redundancy by partitioning styles from raw markup, when necessary. For those who are doing any serious site development, this book [along with Bulletproof Web Design] should be a first read. Very seriously speaking!

I highly recommend this book to anyone who designs and builds web sites. Although the title would have you believe its simply a reference book its much more of a how-to for professionally building your sites. The focus on standardization isn't to limit your creativity or force you into a particular design mode. It means encompassing the best and the WC3's most recommended practices which ensures the long term compatibility of your work.

I've only been working on websites for the last year and so far most of the materials that I've learned from would outline this or that aspect of (X)html or CSS but never really synthesize that into practical use. It was akin to learning how to use a drill, saw and level in a carpentry shop but never shown what they could produce or how they could build something together. However, this book shows through examples and revisions of unstandardized web pages how to write clean and effective code and style sheets. Essentially bringing many of the tools you've learned together for practical use.

If you're looking to improve and ensure the longevity of your web designs then definitely pick this book up. Its one of those rare items that when you find it you wish you would have come across it that much sooner.

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook is a 2004 release by Dan Cederholm. I was inclined to read this book after reading his more recent publication, Bulletproof Web Design. I really enjoy his writing style and the content presented. Though this book was published a few years ago, the principles still apply to many of the modern techniques used to solve problems.

What I liked most about this book was how Dan keeps his opinions to himself and brings facts and solutions to the table. The book was not watered down with 'selling' web standards. Each chapter concluded with several routes to achieving different tasks. Dan walks through each of the methods and explains how each works (and its upsides and downsides). Many of the chapters also concluded with `bonus' or `extra credit' pieces that stretched the reader a step further.

The structure of this book reminded me of Simon Collison's recent book, Beginning CSS Web Development. Both books are excellent in their own respects, and I would recommend having both as a quick reference.

Part One walked through the markup. He took short chapters and devoted them to things such as lists, headings, tables, quotations, and forms. Each chapter discussed old methods for handling tasks, the markup and meaning associated with the tasks, and how to best organize your markup. These chapters give a very thorough understanding of the everyday tags used in web development.

Part Two got down and dirty with CSS and applying it to your markup. Not only did it discuss CSS, but it also discussed organizing your CSS, applying Print styles to your pages, and how to manage things such as text and image replacement (always a tough subject). He gives a very thorough walkthrough of applying CSS - and then looks to the future and stirs up the creative juices.

There are several times where I have referred back to Bulletproof Web Design to help me get creative with different tasks. Dan's writing style is great in that he gets out of the way and opens up the door for you to get creative and get your hands dirty. It's not weighted down with personal opinion or selling - but is loaded with practical techniques and methods. If you are new to CSS and would like to learn best practices, I suggest buying this book along with Simon's book, Beginning CSS Web Development - these two books will give you a solid foundation moving forward. For the advanced CSS developer, this book is still nice to have as a reference.

I really liked this book. The book expounds practical real world application of semantic html and css to common web design tasks. This is an essential book for anyone who wishes to get away from table-based layout design and get into effective page design and layout using standards. The book is practical in the sense that the techniques or best practices outlined include "hacks" to make the css techniques work with browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer that are not fully standards compliant.

I recently volunteered to assist as webmaster for a friend's mayoral campaign website. Having last used HTML and some Javascript years ago for a very basic personal homepage, I needed to get up to speed quickly. So I hit many, many websites and web tutorials on XHTML and CSS. They gave me an acceptable, but not entirely solid foundation on designing with those technologies. I needed more, and fortunately found this book.

Web Standards Solutions did not just build on my shaky foundation, it completely rebuilt it. I can't imagine a better book for my needs.

Chapter by chapter, it is full of concrete examples of how to use standard tags properly and how to use CSS to style your content. It fully explains the strengths and weaknesses of various common markup techniques and makes very good cases for standards-based solutions each time. The chapter on how to use tables properly should be manditory reading for every webdesigner in the business.

Using what I've learned in this book, I've completely rewritten the site I had designed for my friend. It looks identical, but now it uses semantically relavent markup, and leaves the styling and layout to completely to CSS, as it should be. Now, if someone views the site using an old, pre-CSS browser, the site will still render in a highly readable manner. It's also accessible and friendly to folks with disabilities.

I recommend this powerful, well-written book to anyone who maintains a website, no matter how small or large. This book simply will save you time, effort, sweat and tears.

I really liked this book and consider it to be in a class for itself (no pun intended :-).

I especially liked the way the author discussed different methods of solving the same problem, highlighting the pro's and con's of each solution, then summarising in a easily understood conclusion, accompanied by clear examples.

I recommend this book for professionals first, although it of course could be quite useful for amateurs as well.

I've read many CSS books last several years, but still this is the best CSS book out there. The content itself deserves 5 stars, but what separates it from others is Dan's teaching style. From start to end, every page is carefully organized and well planned with readers in mind, this book is not just collection of good CSS tips and tricks. There are so many great books on CSS these days, but this is the best.

Easy to read but very informative. This book is great for beginners and seasoned web designers alike. I've been designing basic web sites for quite a while using the dreaded tables and transparent gif tricks not realizing the great potential of CSS based layouts. Wonderful book! Can't wait to move onto Bulletproof Web Design!

The book was well written for beginners.
Good to us as handbook afterwards.

This book assumes you know html, a little CSS, but are new to web standards.

The chapters are excellent, and the writing style is fun and entertaining.

The power of this book is in its simplicity. And it is this simplicity that makes it absolutely excellent.

I especially liked how each chapter includes multiple methods to accomplish the same task, followed by their pros and cons.

Some of things the book covers such as 'semantic markup' is so cleverly simple, and yet so basic I often wonder why I never employed these techniques previously.

This book truly reads as the title infers, as it is a 'Markup and Style Handbook'. All I can say is if you are into constructing web pages with web standards, this is really a must have book. I would almost consider it to be a 'classic' for the web standards movement.

Just Buy it!

Web Standards Solutions is an essential book for anyone who designs websites with CSS or wants to learn how. It's a solid book on CSS, and perfect for someone who is familiar with the basics of how CSS styling works, but is looking to learn how to use it effectively in real-world designs. But while this is an excellent book on CSS, it is a groundbreaking book on HTML.

This is a perfect second or third book on HTML. Everyone who works with HTML ought to have a nice big reference book, such as O'Reilly's "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide." Many people also have some kind of "Learn HTML Fast!" book. After you've worked your way through those and understand how HTML works, "Web Standards Solutions" is the book to have. It won't teach you how to write a web page: it will teach you to write a better web page. This book goes through repeated examples of how you might want to format some piece of information -- a list, a heading, a quotation, emphasized text -- and goes through various possible ways of makring it up. Cederholm explains the advantages of using HTML tags that imply meaning like "li" or "strong" over tags that imply presentation like "span" or "b". He also has a lot of coverage of useful semantic tags you may not be familiar with, such as dictionary lists, fieldsets, table captions, and citations, as well as discussion about how to use semantic tags to make your site more accessible to alternative browsers, such as screen readers for the blind and older browsers that don't support the latest design techniques.

The whole first section of the book is focused on producing effective semantic markup, along with some good examples demonstrating how that markup can be styled in various ways. The second section then goes on to cover additional CSS topics that don't require any changes the underlying content. Separate stylesheets for printing, producing an overall page layout, elaborate text styles, and replacing text with images are all covered.

This book won't teach you a huge arsenal of advanced CSS design techniques used by cutting edge professionals, but if you work through what's presented, you'll have a solid foundation, and you shouldn't have any trouble understanding new techniques you read about. The one real weakness of this book is that while it teaches a good selection of individual elements and techniques, it doesn't focus on putting it all together into building cohesive pages and sites.

I picked up "Web Standards Solutions" and Dan Cederholm's other book "Bulletproof Web Design" as a package from Amazon. While I prefer the latter because of it's smooth read and less academic feel, "Web Standards Solutions" provides a nice foundation for getting a handle of CSS essentials and limited markup. I only found it lacking in the area of advanced CSS layout, which can be a tad frustrating if you're looking to this book to answer all of CSS mysteries. Even those who are experienced with CSS may find some new insight in the area of limited markup, which is key in developing sites that are optimized for search engines and markup that is truly independent of it's layout. In short, it's a quick read and well worth the cost at any skill level.

To begin producing web solutions when 3.0 and 4.0 browsers were the standard much of my formal knowledge and experiential instincts had remained grounded there. Eventually ASP.NET 1.0 was released and I forgot that world for a time and went out-of-the-box. But by the time I decided to balance the tradeoffs between controls and manually input markup, the browser landscape had changed quite a bit. You got Firefox and Safari as well as much improved versions of more senior offerings.

It wasn't enough to use MasterPages, Themes, and Skins for my latest project. I also wanted to be XHTML compliant and reduce HTML and CSS footprint. In other words, I was shooting for smaller, cheaper, faster. So I checked out an article on A List Apart called "Thinking Outside the Grid". Although I didn't want agree with everything said (one indicating that I am that old), I did start to wonder if there was a better way. The better way I considered was how to lower overall complexity while boosting elegance compared the same solution in older technologies. Using the insights in the book can better position solutions for a wider array of presentation types.

By properly adopting the guidelines presented here, I significantly reduced extraneous markup I would have written to minimize strain on bandwidth. It also provided the grounding needed to migrate away from certain uses of server controls and better leverage non-programmatic techniques. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more effective CSS can be applied when using you properly structure the markup. Coupled with the W3C Validator on the web, you can arrive at some great finishing touches on the solution's markup specification.

This is the best CSS book that I've used. The topics are laid out very clearly. I love that the book is succinct and I can delve right into the examples and apply them right away to my website. This book has really helped me to write more efficient code and to design more visually pleasing websites. It has great explanations about pros and cons of different methods of code implementation. I highly recommend this book to designers who are new to CSS. You should start with this book.

The concepts that are taught in this book are essential for anyone working on the web. Dan will open your eyes about the way web documents should be structured so that it is accessible by 'all' audiences (people using different browsers and people with visual impairments) AND so they'll be easy to style and maintain.

Each chapter starts with a goal and then he presents different approaches to achieve that goal...weighing the pros/cons for each method.

Dan conveys the information in a clear, succinct and "matter of fact" style. I actually took this book with me on the subway one day and was so engrossed that I missed my stop! :)

This book was an amazing resource for me. Since buying it, it's been in my messenger bag to ensure a quick reference at both work and at home.

This is a perfect book for a web-designer that has been toying with css for a while and is ready to make the jump to full-fleged web standards.

Like Zeldman's "Designing w/ Web Standards", this book reads more like a conversation than a tech book. It explains things easily and not in a condescending way.

I particularly liked the way this book gives you real-world explanations of taking what you are *used* to doing and showing you how to better do it with css. It's very clear and makes the transition much easier.

My only complaint from this book was that CSS Positioning was not covered very lightly. It would have been nice to have expanded on this area bit more.

I can't recommend this book enough.

An excellent walk-through on how to separate the semantic content from the presentational view of web pages using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It's one thing to know what CSS is but it's quite another to learn it's full potential. With this book you'll learn how to extract all of you presentational markup and even improve upon it through the use of powerful CSS techniques. If you still use B, I, or FONT tags, you need this book! Using the information in this book, coupled with a scripting language (Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP), and a database (MySQL, etc), you can create a powerful code generation utility for producing or updating entire websites with simple templates.

I read this book from cover to cover, and was sorry to see it come to an end. I don't say that about too many books, let alone computer manuals, but this is one is exceptional. Prior to reading Web Standards Solutions, I had never found a good rationale for using CSS. Oh sure, it's the new web standard, and everyone will say it's the right thing to do, just like eating your spinach. But no one had ever shown me what CSS is good for until Dan Cederholm came along.

Here's the reason, in four words: It makes things easy.

If you have been struggling with tables nested in tables nested in more tables, with pieces of images here and bits of images there, and font declarations everywhere, all so that you can make things line up nicely and make your pages look attractive, be aware that there is a way out of the wilderness. Dan Cederholm can show you how. In the process, he has created a fine example of the way a computer manual ought to be written.

The first section of the book deals with using CSS to mark up various elements of a page, including lists, headings, forms, anchors, and, yes, even tables. The second section broadens the scope to consider how CSS can be used to structure larger things, like an entire page. For example, there's a very good (and simple!) section on how to set up a page with a header, footer, and two columns. By adding a few lines of CSS, the two-column layout can be turned into three columns. And with no tables at all. Hallelujah.

Each section of the book starts with an explanation of what he would like to accomplish -- create a menu, for instance, or apply a font style to just one page on a site, or one element on a page. He then shows you several ways that you can use CSS to do this, and goes over the pros and cons of each. The code is always simple, even though the results are impressive, because CSS allows you to do these things easily. But to keep you from going astray, Mr. Cederholm first shows the basic code, then adds one feature at a time, and shows the result of that. All of this is presented so clearly that it's trivial to understand, yet highly effective when you see what he's accomplished.

As for caveats, there are only a couple. It should be emphasized that the book is an introduction to CSS; if you're looking for a comprehensive guide to every feature of the language, you won't find it here. The book will definitely whet your appetite, and make you want to learn more, but you'll need other manuals to take you further.

I was also going to say that CSS veterans probably won't find much that is new here, but on second thought I'm not entirely sure of that. There are a lot of nifty ideas in this book. Mr. Cederholm was the designer for the Fast Company web site, and he shows some of the problems he encountered when architecting that site, and the solutions he came up with. They are clever and simple, but not necessarily obvious.

If you're debating whether to buy the book, take a look at a sample chapter on the author's web site. I did, and was so impressed that I went ahead and bought the book. I suspect you will, too.

Noted web standards guru Dan Cederholm (of SimpleBits fame) presents sixteen chapters devoted to the effective and optimal use of XHTML markup followed by advanced CSS techniques layered upon that markup. While much of this information has been covered before and will be familiar to intermediate and advanced XHTML coders, several of the CSS chapters are real eye-openers, even for advanced technicians. For example, in Chapter 11: Print Styles, Cederholm discusses an extremely effective technique for allowing the user to switch between alternative layouts of your page (two-column, three-column) without the need for a round-trip to the server. And Chapter 15: Styling sounds innocent enough, but presents a technique that allows the developer to provide some basic Content Management System (CMS) functionality as applied to web templating. It's a short book (238 pages), and quick read, but may prove indispensible from a design, productivity, and business perspective. Highly recommended.

I've been looking for a good book on building pages with web standards, and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm fit the bill perfectly. This is not a reference book, but rather a collection of clear examples for creating pages. Topics covered include forms, anchors, printing and CSS layouts (i.e. non-table-based layouts).

One aspect of the book that is especially good is that each chapter is divided into a basic and an (optional) advanced section. So you can really get as much out of each particular topic as you need to. Also, each chapter shows multiple solutions for a particular problem. Usually the first solution is non-CSS. Then the author goes on to show more elegant solutions using CSS. This approach makes the case for web standards better than any abstract argument ever could. The reader can clearly see that doing things the standards way is better, but also understands other options that are available.

My only criticism (aside from the awful title) is that I would have liked an additional chapter on advanced layout techniques. If you're already a CSS Master, you won't need this book. But for anyone else doing HTML work, I highly recommend it.

I have been reading Dan's blog (Simple Bits) for several months, but this book is highly recommended for Web Standards. I've been working with CSS for about three years now, but trying to piece various bits of information together has been difficult at times. Dan's book brings the everyday elements of web development together and provides a simple understanding and examples of everything he discusses. I especially like the "Extra Credit" section at the end of each chapter where Dan goes into more depth for those that want to push the limits. I'm now reading his new book "Bulletproof Web Design" and I'm loving it.

This is a fairly small book for its kind, but don't let the size fool you. The advice is clear, concise and works in real world situations. The "go to" book for CSS/XHTML beginners through professionals. It has a permanent place on my desk and should have one on yours too.

Use this book as you would a series of tutorials. Each chapter is a lesson, and each lesson presents three or four ways of doing the same thing, showing the pros and cons of the various methods. This book is an easy structured way of getting to know practical CSS. The book does not provide a structured overview of CSS. For that see Eric Meyer's 'Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide' from O'Reilly, or better still, look up the specifications on W3C. Thee comprehensive sources do not give you the practical hands on tips that are set out in a helpful way in Cederholm's 'Web Standards Solutions.'

Quick Review:

Doesn't blab about how webstandards are so important.. yada yada yada...

Just gives examples of how to write better XHTML/CSS code in an easy to read format.

A good addition to the arsenal for any web developer.

For just under a year now I have been dipping into the online community of advocates for the many uses of CSS. As someone who is a graphic designer and part time web designer it can sometimes be a pain to find that mix of visual, structural, and functional design needed to take your portfolio and skills to the next level.

This book takes a very clear approach to laying out many paths to a single, or similiar, solutions. I think a big problem with all of us "non gurus" who are trying to get into CSS is knowing whether a tag or style is compatible with the "popular browsers" and if we are going to hand off the project to our clients full of holes and subsequently full of complaints. You can trust Dan as a professional who lays down a number of approaches that can be used, none of which are totally obselete and are going to leave you with an unhappy client.

Another great element of this book is the value it adds to your work. When you put these skills to work on your sites, your not only creating visually great work, but your also making your work compatible on all levels (hand helds, multiple browsers, screen readers, non CSS compatible browsers)and the book even shows why using specific techniques will optimize your code for search engines (and anyone worth thier weight in gold knows how important search engine optimization is for clients).

There are alot of great reasons to fork over your money on this book. As I believe I heard someone mention before, if you have basic CSS knowledge and this book you will be ready to rock. Just dont pick it up expecting to learn CSS from the ground up. For those who have that basic working knowledge, this is the next step in your CSS revolution!

This book is not a reference, nor a comprehensive tutorial on XHTML / CSS. It shows through examples the advantages of these techniques without getting on a soapbox and preaching for pages on end. Ideally, you would have this book, and a comprehensive tutorial/reference book.

I am very pleased with this book. For a while now I've been learning CSS by looking at the code of webpages I liked, and I picked up a lot of bad habits. This book helped me understand how useful coding to the standards can be. I have gone back and completely redesigned my site with the help of this book; now, in the future, I am confident that site-wide changes will be easy and painless.

The converstational tone of the book was a welcome change from the more technical tone of other books on programming subjects. One of my favorite little moments was under the subheading "A cite for curious eyes" (about the cite tag) and he writes: "Getting tired of the corny headings yet? Oh, good. Neither am I." That's a good example of the light tone that helps make the more technical information easy to digest.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I know my webpages now and in the future will benefit greatly from the knowledge I got from reading it. I highly recommend it to those who know a bit about CSS, but want to know more. Keep Google handy any time you want to find out more about a certain tag or something that he assumes you know if you aren't sure about it; there were just a few I had trouble with, but a quick search on google cleared it up for me quickly.

First off, this book is definitely not a reference book, if you want to code up in XHTML and CSS, then you need to do the groundwork which is covered in other books. What this book does do, is show you how to practically apply these technologies in everyday situations of web design, and show patterns of commonly accepted, useful tricks and techniques.

Invaluable to the freshly converted - yes - but make sure you know your stuff or this book will leave you floating nowhere. There are no explanations, or details on XHTML or CSS, you must have a reasonably good grasp of both.
The book assumes we are here to learn the simple applications without being confusing. Thats cool, but the book also assumes you have a good working knowledge of CSS, so its simple, but not so simple. I was disappointed that there was not much depth to the examples shown, and some of the potential pitfalls were not indicated. For example, on the chapter on CSS positioning, were given a float method, but its not explained why this is not ideal or where to find more information about the related issues. That stuff would seem relevant to the readers of this book.

Anyway, i enjoyed it, it was really useful - all the applications are excellent, but be careful as you will probably get stuck without a grounding in XHTML and CSS.

Finally!!! I have been looking for this book for years. I'm a professional web application developer with years of experience on the technical side ( java/cold fusion/cgi/sql ). But I never *really* understood how to use CSS effectively, and I've spent WAY too much time dinking around with tables and goofy HTML tricks. This book was just what I needed. A logical explanation of the different approaches and how they really work. No wasted paper in this book. Its worth three times the price.

This is a cookbook (it's not a reference book), and it'll show you day-to-day tricks to create professional web sites separating structure and information from presentation using XHTML & CSS.
What I liked too is that markups should be as much descriptive as possible (using tables only for tabular data, using h1 tags, em instead of i, strong instead of b, lists for lists of items, whatever it is, even for navigation menus that are just a list of links. This is very clever.
Dan will prove you that tableless layout is the best and that it's possible to create state-of the art web sites with CSS.
Download the CSS handbook in PDF from the W3C web site and buy this book. You're done.

Errata: there's only one error that I noticed: p.104 under "Dotted borders", 1st snippet, it's written "text-decoration: green;", but it should read "text-decoration: none;", but from the context, it's obvious for the reader ;)

This is an indispensable book for folks who are familiar with HTML, but who want to take it to the next level and learn CSS and XHTML. The lessons are very practical and the methods are explained very clearly. While this book can be a reference, I read it through. It prepared me to implement a simple, clean CSS-based redesign of my website without having to refer to any other sources. Additionally, the way Cederholm explains things (by comparing different methods to achieve the same end), he makes you realize why standards-based design is superior. After you read this book, you won't be able to believe how inelegant and inefficient your traditional HTML design has been.

This is THE best book I've read regarding Web Standards... The examples are simple and practical... I've found myself using many of the suggestions offered for various aspects of web design.

Dan makes things understandable and presents different ways of solving common design problems... everything from the most common solution to the most efficient solution... best of all, you'll understand why the solution is the most efficient.