Bulletproof web design improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS

Synopsis

No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it's not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn't really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Design, author and Web designer Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control-key components of every successful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site-one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach-which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template. You'll learn to: Size text using keywords and percentages to allow more user control, Provide site navigation that scales to any text size or amount of content, Plan for vertical expansion of horizontal page components, Use floats to achieve grid-like results, Plan for the unknown when constructing styled boxes, Ensure that content is still readable in the absence of images or CSS, Strip the presentation from data tables, and rebuild with CSS, Experiment with page layouts that expand and contract. Book jacket.