Book Review: Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website with Dreamweaver 8
February 14, 2006
Who is this book good for?
I would say intermediate level web designers who are comfortable with code and concepts related to web design (like Web standards and semantic meaning of code etc …) and feel a need to brush up on some Web standards nerd stuff again while learning Dreamweaver 8.
The book is NOT FOR BEGINNERS to Dreamweaver or to web design. Yet at the same time, the author goes into topics that experienced web designers will probably not need to learn … again:
- How to set up a web server.
- What SSI (server side includes) are.
- What XML is.
- How to plan a website … I’m talking real basic stuff.
Why is this book not for beginners?
I think the problem lies in the way certain topics are covered; I think it would be too fast for most beginners.
Other topics covered:
- Forms
- Accessibility
- Website structures/practices – sitemaps, using includes etc.
The positives:
The writing is clear and the editing is good, as is typical of SitePoint books – please keep in mind what I said about who the reader should be!
It is a project based based book, where you are guided through the process of building a website – this may be useful for some to see. You also get a look at how to use Dreamweaver in the context of Web standards and accessibility … some good tips can be found.
The negatives:
Besides what I mentioned above, I disagree with the author’s style of building websites: she combines modern code and structural practices but uses old style methods of web site construction/production: she creates the structure of the site first, then moves to styling it with CSS.
This is a better approach than building everything up at once, but I am a big believer in starting out with page-level layouts first (by way of template,) then moving to adding elements to the page.
I also think she (like many other web designers out there today,) have smoked a little too much of the Web-standards-zealot wacky-tabacci, and have become overly enamored with XHTML and validations etc. To be fair though, my point of view is heretical … even if it is right!
For example: XHTML – please not again!
The author (like many other poor souls) love XHTML for a bunch of reasons that have little, if any relevance in the real-world. In fact, the reasons that they (the zealots) love XHTML so much, is actually lost with 80% of the users on the web today!
Let me explain:
You see, IE 6 and IE 7 will render XHTML as ‘tag soup’ – I don’t want to get into it here, but in a nutshell, IE 6 and IE 7 doesn’t read XHTML properly! So when either browser comes across an XHTML page, it reads it as crappy HTML.
On the other hand, XHTML makes pages that much harder to code, and it makes DOM scripting a pain in the butt. There is no real reason to want to use XHTML except (of course) if you want to be anal about code and you feel need to create work for yourself for no good reason …
How about another example of the authors poor choices: using CSS hacks.
Again, I don’t want to get into here but, CSS hacks are bad news since many will break in the new IE 7 – authors should not be teaching the use of hacks!
