Rating:  - Great tips for building standards based sites!
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!
Rating: - very good for beginners
The book was well written for beginners.
Good to us as handbook afterwards.
Rating: - Great for Learning Web Standards
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!
Rating: - A terrific book for intermediate web designers
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.
Rating:  - Breif Review of Web Standards Solutions
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.
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